Month: November 2014

Starbucks Ebola Rant

The thing that I was not aware of is that… what Starbucks was doing, is they were taking specimens of male semen, and they were putting it in the blends of their lattes. It’s the absolute truth. My suspicion is that they’re getting their semen from sodomites. Semen flavours up the coffee, and makes you thinks you’re having a good time

Fishing Watch

see also: Overview Effect

For now, Global Fishing Watch only displays ship activity from the previous 2 years, but Oceana aims to eventually incorporate more recent data that will allow authorities to act quickly.

“The plan is that we will build out a public release version that will have near-real-time data, Then you’ll actually be able to see someone out there fishing within hours to days.”

Oceana has already used the system to monitor boats that have already been tagged for illegal fishing, though it still doesn’t pick up boats that haven’t registered with the automatic identification system, as well as vessels that go dark before reaching restricted waters. But the hope is that over time, Global Fishing Watch will serve as an important check to encourage fishers to stay within the law.

Goldberg Robotics

“In the future, robots must be able to solve tasks in deep mines on distant planets, in radioactive disaster areas, in hazardous landslip areas and on the sea bed beneath the Antarctic”—as well as in the cracks of otherwise inaccessible archaeological sites. We need to send machines capable of not exactly of replication, but something more like budding or fruiting, using 3D printers. Imagine a robot being sent into “the wreckage of a nuclear power plant,” for example, where it encounters a stairway it had not been anticipating needing to climb. For the moment, it’s stuck. So what does it do? “The robot takes a picture. The picture is analysed. The arms of one of the robots is fitted with a printer. This produces a new robot, or a new part for the existing robot, which enables it to negotiate the stairs.”

What it takes to explore

This is nuts

In the story of how European Space Agency researchers are scrambling to locate—and possibly move—the Philae probe, which they successfully landed on Comet 67P 2 days ago, there’s an interesting comment about computer vision and the perception of exotic landscapes.


“It’s an entirely manual process, because the complex and bizarre landscape of comet 67P defies any kind of automated search. We don’t have an algorithm for this”

Banksy Does NY

Banksy Does New York (premiering on Monday, showing on HBOGo now) is a documentary whose purpose is to show the hysteria that seemed to fill the streets of NYC during Banksy’s last visit to the “Big Apple.” The content of this documentary is promoted as coming from the people of New York themselves. Director Chris Moukarbel (in a fashion similar to what film director Kevin B. Lee did with last year’s Transformers: Premake) compiled video footage from various Internet channels (YouTube, Instagram, Vine, Twitter, etc.) uploaded by select Banksy “hunters” to showcase the scene found at all 31 days of Banksy’s NYC residency. It does not commit fully to its tagline of being a “user generated film”, but, even with some stumbles, it manages to provide at least some insight into the madness that was Better Out Than In.

Omnivores

In case you forgot who the top predator on the planet is.

Ever wonder what do people in other countries eat? What could be totally weird for us to eat could be a luxurious delicacy for others — and the other way around. Here are 101 of the strangest foods around the world and maybe after reading this list, you can agree that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Lifting Men

I thought it was hilarious at first when Mallory declared in a comment thread that it was her fitness goal to be able to pick up and lift a grown man over her head. Afterwards, I started noticing that other Toasties were declaring this in a tongue-in-cheek way, and I started thinking, “well, why not?” The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn’t any more ridiculous or unlikely than any headline or superlative you catch on a mainstream fitness magazine, like “Get Amazing Abs in 16 Minutes!” I figured any program written to help a woman pick up a man and lift him overhead was going to lead to better overall health and fitness than any program written to “reveal your abs” in short period of time. The scenario I gave everyone was this: any woman, trying to pick up a 84 kg man any way she can, lifting him overhead any way she can. I chose 84 kg somewhat arbitrarily: although 90 kg men seem very normal to me, I spend a lot of time in powerlifting and olympic weightlifting gyms and realize that my concept of “normal” is very skewed. Also, the median weight class for men in those sports seem to float around 84 kg.