Over the years, other agents have pulled off similar stings—like the one in 2009 where 2 FBI agents staged a wedding aboard a yacht and trapped an Asian counterfeiting gang, scoring over $100M in cash. In 2015 Houston police created a fake modeling studio in an operation designed to trap 40 johns. In 2013 Belgian police caught a Somali pirate by hiring him as a consultant for a fake movie. The Michigan wedding in 1990 was the original, and the greatest.
Month: May 2015
Space Slippage
it’s interesting that as far as i can tell, among space companies, only spacex manages to keep their schedules. virgin galactic suborbital was supposed to launch to the public in 2014, and bigelow aerospace was supposed to have inflatable crew modules 3x the volume of the ISS in orbit by 2015.
Bloated web
Facebook has put everyone else on notice. Your content better load fast or you’re screwed. Publication websites have become an absolutely bloated mess. They range from beautiful (The Verge) to atrocious (Bloomberg) to unusable (Forbes). The common denominator: they’re all way too slow. Instant karma’s gonna get them
this is why i have javascript off by default, and only allowlist maybe 10 sites. it avoids all those stupid “widgets” that these sites love so much.
The price of efficiency for advertisers’ is the user experience of the reader. The problem for publishers, though, is that $ and cents — which come from advertisers — are a far more scarce resource than are page views, leaving publishers with a binary choice: provide a great user experience and go out of business, or muddle along with all of the baggage that relying on advertising networks entails
Jenglish
Photonic Laser Thruster
This is of course a staple of science fiction, so it is nice to see it become real.
Neural implants
Neural implants could accomplish things no external interface could: Virtual and augmented reality with all 5 senses (or more); augmentation of human memory, attention, and learning speed; even multi-sense telepathy — sharing what we see, hear, touch, and even perhaps what we think and feel with others. Sound crazy? It is… and it’s not
The past was not peaceful
Left-liberals who espouse strident progressive social justice views ascribe regressive practices among non-whites purely to extraneous Western colonial influences, as if non-white peoples were innocents in the garden before the arrival of Europeans. Whereas a previous generation of white supremacists perceived in the non-Western the inferior and primitive, a modern generation of Westerners sees the authentic and pristine. Though the moral valence differs, the underlying structural framework is the same. To truly carve nature about its joints in a manner which exhibits appropriate fidelity we need to go beyond this reflex. Hopefully in such a manner we can also begin to probe our own past without fewer illusions which are haunted by the present
AOL
in celebration of AOLOL, a look at version 4 which still kinda works
Surgical Errors
“Nobody, nobody other than a neurosurgeon, understands what it is like to have to drag yourself up to the ward and see, every day—sometimes for months on end—somebody one has destroyed and face the anxious and angry family at the bedside.” The schoolteacher lived on in just this way. 7 years after that failed surgery, Marsh was visiting a home for vegetative patients when he looked into a room and “saw his grey curled-up body in its bed.”
Microbatteries
A high-performance 3D microbattery that could be integrated into microchips at production volumes has been developed by researchers. Miniaturizing a battery to fit in a microchip is a major challenge, but it would be important for providing power to microscale devices such as actuators, distributed wireless sensors and transmitters, and portable and implantable medical devices.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 