The patent trolls at Intellectual Ventures inventing something is a new development, although impractical given that malaria infested areas don’t usually have reliable power: it kills 100 mosquitoes / s within a 30m radius.
Month: March 2014
Word 1.0 source
downloading now to find new 0days
1T odors
plus ~5M colors and ~340K auditory tones.
humans are capable of discriminating at least 1T different odors — not just 10K different odors, a number first proposed decades ago and not backed by data.
FB buys Oculus
why would a clickfarm buy them? makes no sense to me.
Maritime trade risks
an estimated 1000 sailors die per year (2 large ships / week) to bring us global trade.
It looked almost like a landfill in some areas. Containers had split like dropped melons, spewing cargo: remote-control boats, golf clubs, frozen lobster tails, bicycles, 1000s of plastic air fresheners. A few days into the salvage operation, the stink of rotting seafood got so foul that Austin swiped an air freshener, cracked it open, and rubbed the fragrance cartridge on his mustache.
Facebook Fatigue
they’re working on some g+ functionality too, like hiding boring reshares, or excessive talking about trivial events of the day.
Solving Events
a robust system for public events would be an amazing public good, but all efforts to create it have failed. there are plenty of startups that have tried, they’re full of spam, and the social networks make it pretty impossible to find events.
Against holistic “medicine”
woo like this needs to be stamped out. this simultaneously raises my opinion of mr. wales and further lowers it of change.org (though it was already pretty terrible). Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia responds to ridiculous petition seeking to force Wikipedia to take pseudoscience at face value.
No, you have to be kidding me. Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful.
Wikipedia’s policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals – that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately.
Gangster cosplay in Bangkok
ok, this is weird
Sinkhole of bureaucracy
Vogon from the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy exist in pennsylvania.
This is one of the weirdest workplaces in the US government — both for where it is and for what it does. Here, inside the caverns of an old Pennsylvania limestone mine, there are 600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management. Their task is nothing top-secret. It is to process the retirement papers of the government’s own workers. But that system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 