Month: September 2016

Kebab

NYC is getting its own kebab:

Heatherwick Studio revealed the first renderings of “Vessel,” a 15-story tall occupiable sculpture comprised of 154 intricately interconnecting flights of stairs that will serve as the centerpiece of the new Hudson Yards development in west Manhattan.

Monsanto saves bees

fighting tons of anti-intellectuals

The rhetoric offended Hayes’ sense of fairness. He knew that environmentalists linked colony collapse to neonicotinoid insecticides and that they thought Monsanto was somehow to blame. But he also knew that Monsanto doesn’t make insecticides. The company’s most famous product, glyphosate—that’s Roundup—kills plants. Its second-most famous product—Roundup-ready seeds—allows plants to resist its most famous product.

DOOM 2016 Tech breakdown

The new DOOM is a perfect addition to the franchise, using the new id Tech 6 engine where ex-Crytek Tiago Sousa now assumes the role of lead renderer programmer after John Carmack’s departure. Historically id Software is known for open-sourcing their engines after a few years, which often leads to nice remakes and breakdowns. Whether this will stand true with id Tech 6 remains to be seen but we don’t necessarily need the source code to appreciate the nice graphics techniques implemented in the engine.

fascinating how much work goes into this. see also the analysis of the 2020 successor, using id Tech 7.

Namesake Brewery

little known fact: i used to run a brewery.

G. Rothfuss Brewery opened in 1880 and closed in 1882. Breweries that are only open for a couple of years like this did not have a long time to produce advertising and collectibles so they tend to be more scarce than breweries with more longevity. As a Pre-Prohibition Brewery, any advertising items or collectibles are likely to be valuable and desirable to collectors as they tend to be hard to find. G. Rothfuss Brewery was located in Springfield, MA, which only had 4 breweries, so there are not many that that were producing breweriana items. Local collectors may pay a small premium over national or general collectors because of a lack of local items.

Aluminum Stockpile

A California aluminum executive commissioned a pilot to fly over the Mexican town of San José Iturbide and snap aerial photos of a remote desert factory. He made a startling discovery. Nearly 1M tons of aluminum sat neatly stacked behind a fortress of barbed-wire fences. The stockpile, worth some $2b and representing 6% of the world’s total inventory quickly became an obsession for the US aluminum industry.