Month: July 2015
Standing room airplanes
the article is a bit too patronizing, as vastly cheaper air travel would be great. it could be achieved with standing room only for short commuter flights though.
Internet of trash
The Hoax Photo Test
will all the nonsense being sent around, you need to train your hoax detection skills. this quiz is a fun way to do so. and the site in general is an entertaining read.
The 10 ka plan for London
To ensure its own longevity, the building utilizes a series of caryatids and atlantes as its structural support system. 1 of the oldest artifacts ever discovered is a figurine of a woman which is estimated to be over 40 ka old. To ensure the relevance of the scheme over multiple generations, the building favors the endurance of the human form over the fleeting nature of architectural style
Has life evolved multiple times?
Desert varnish – into which people have scraped petroglyphs for 1000s of years – appears layer by layer, growing only the width of a human hair each millennium. The varnish is replete with arsenic, iron and manganese, although the rocks it coats are not. No known geochemical or biological process can account for its ingredients. And yet there it is.
Collaborative bullet time photography
Bullet time has always been the preserve of high-budget movies, but now anyone can create films like this using collaborative photography techniques on their smartphones.
that should be really fun if it takes off.
The Awl
Founded in 2009 by Choire Sicha and Alex Balk, The Awl stands counter to the prevailing trends in the media industry, commenting skeptically on the conventions of the wider web while running a mix of stories that are both wide-ranging and unabashedly specific: writerly reviews of the previous day’s weather, deconstructions of minion memes, tirades against negronis and the Moon, personal essays, deadpan lists, poetry. The site’s tone, knowingly smart and aloof from the news cycle, is especially popular among people who work in media, and it has become a farm team for larger publications. Lately, under the editorship of Herrman and Matt Buchanan, it also publishes some of the most incisive criticism about the ongoing collision of media and technology.
A prion love story
i think this would make for a great movie with a science-literate plot:
Results showed she had the defective gene. Sonia and Eric hesitated briefly, and then decided to make it their life’s work to find a cure for Sonia before she got sick. They have 25 years to crack an amazingly difficult scientific puzzle, maybe 10 years more
DARPA robotics challenge
this is very exciting in light of all the 0 day nonsense. the reason amateurs like “hacking team” have any business is because most people don’t patch their systems. imagine a future where systems patch themselves constantly.
“We held the world’s biggest Capture the Flag and all the contestants were robots.” — Mike Walker, Program Manager of DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge
Gregor J. Rothfuss 