As Whole Foods arrives, hope departs. Ethnic restaurants will be replaced with half an aisle dedicated to “international ingredients.” Greek will be the only variety of yogurt and the quality of kale will be as high as the rent for an alcove studio. Lana Del Rey will be elected to the city’s council. There will be a great migration of former residents to more affordable housing. As they are loading their U-Hauls, one of them, a man without a ukulele, will look to the heavens and ask “Why?” He will hear the voice whisper a single word: “Kombucha.”
Month: November 2015
Brooklyn first supertall
that looks amazing.
Juiced
on the stupidity of paying $25 for a lunch of vegetable shavings and a smoothie made of Swiss chard, cashew milk and Himalayan salt.
Health Nucleus
This looks amazing, especially once it comes down a factor of 10 in price.
25K USD will buy you a sequencing of your genome, your microbiome and a scan of your brain and your blood. These prices are amazing if you consider what this would have cost just in consumables a few short years ago….sadly still way too expensive for me… maybe in 4-5 years time it will become cheap enough to do what I did with 23andme and get it done to all my family… let’s see
Mailing Children
Have you ever wished you didn’t have to travel with your child (or grandchild)? If you lived in the United States in 1913 or 1914 you had an alternative. Send him or her by mail! You could use the US Parcel Post Service which began on January 1, 1913. Regulations stated that a package could not weigh more than 22 kg and not much else. The initial regulations included a provision that allowed shipping of live bees and bugs, but no rules allowing or against shipping of children. The rest of this article details several incidents of mailing children.
Fluid dynamics
the progress on fluid dynamics looks particularly noteworthy.
SETI lower bound
we show that we can set a firm lower bound on the probability that 1 or more additional technological species have evolved anywhere and at any time in the history of the observable Universe. We find that as long as the probability that a habitable zone planet develops a technological species is larger than ~$10^{-24}$, then humanity is not the only time technological intelligence has evolved.
Fossil fuel lawsuits
The fossil-fuel industry—which, for 2 centuries, underwrote our civilization and then became its greatest threat—has started to take serious hits. Today, President Obama rejected the Keystone Pipeline, becoming the first world leader to turn down a major project on climate grounds. 18 hours earlier, New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issued subpoenas to Exxon, the richest and most profitable energy company in history, after substantial evidence emerged that it had deceived the world about climate change.
The Vatican Mafia
One audit commissioned by COSEA revealed hundreds of people misappropriating the Vatican’s tax-free status to resell cheap gasoline and cigarettes at great profit. An audit of the Vatican museums and pharmacy showed serious discrepancies—amounting to $100Ks—between what appeared on the books and what was actually in storehouses, suggesting either systematic theft or fraud
nothing has changed from the time of the borgias in 1502
Mail at ransom
The project centers on an archive of undelivered letters — many of them unopened — sent from across Europe to The Hague between 1689 and 1707. The archive was established by the postmasters in an attempt to profit from their business. At that time, recipients were responsible for paying for any letters they received, and if the letters were undelivered, the postmasters would keep them in the hope that someday the recipient would search for the letter and pay them what was owed.
i think that’s my mail man!
Gregor J. Rothfuss 