Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Bre Pettis creates a Rube Goldbert project from twigs and vines, rocks and fern branches, in the middle of a forest. Sticks and stones. Final product looks deceptively simple, though you can imagine how hard it must have been to get everything working.
Wired covers the Test Tube Meat story. Short version: hamburger in two years, steak in 10 (steak requires better alignment of muscle fibers and the ability to recreate blood vessels running through). Stuff being grown without scaffolds in 1mm sheets, which can then be stacked to create thicker cuts.
The “yuck” factor: “But it’s not natural!” And how natural is it to stuff 10,000 chickens into a metal shed, snip off their beaks and pump them full of antibiotics and hormones? How natural is it for cows to eat corn? (which is pretty much all factory farmed cows eat, much to the detriment of their livers).
This research strikes me as a great leap forward in human consciousness. I hope that one day we’ll view factory farming as a barbarism of the past.
Previously: Lab Meat. See also Meat-Growing Robots (WTF?)
Technorati Tags: animalrights, food, meat
Used to be that stock photos cost a couple hundred bucks or more. Used to be that photographers could make good money in stock photography. But now millions of people have (more or less) high-quality digital cameras and broadband internet, sites are finding ways to leverage the public’s massive image database.
In The Rise of Crowdsourcing, Wired follows a stock photographer watching his business being undermined (if not decimated) by the rise of sites like iStockphoto, where the public can contribute images to sell — at prices ranging from $1 to $10, rather than the more traditional $400.
Of course all of the images at iStockphoto are by “amateurs” rather than pros. But browsing the collection, it’s clear that there are thousands of images there that most web/print designers would consider to be “good enough.”
Aside from the fact that most amateurs will never earn enough from a site like this to pay the rent (or even buy a bag of groceries), I’m curious about what kind of revenue the site itself can make with margins that low. As brilliant as the idea is, seems like usage would have to be extremely high to make it sustainable.
And there are 100% free alternatives out there, such as the Creative Commons collection at Flickr. stock.xchng is another. Other royalty-free or low-cost image sources you guys know about?
Technorati Tags: crowdsourcing, photography, stock
The pathway to hell is paved with good intentions.
Surveillance cameras designed to catch red light runners have a significant back-fire effect: Driver fear of getting tickets by racing through the yellow causes more people to slam on their brakes at the last minute. Result: More traffic accidents overall, not fewer. Popular Mechanics:
Likewise, red-light cameras in Portland, Ore., produced a 140 percent increase in rear-end collisions at monitored intersections, and a study by the Virginia Transportation Research Council found that although red-light cameras decreased collisions resulting from people running traffic lights, they significantly increased accidents overall.
It gets better: Because traffic light surveillance is a huge revenue opportunity for cities ($32 million in revenues for Washington DC alone), and because people tend to have more violations when yellow lights are shorter, there is suddenly a financial incentive to decrease the yellow light duration. City planners tempted with Faustian deal: More revenue at the expense of more accidents. What red-blooded mayor could resist? One Maryland area apparently saw yellow light durations in one area drop from 4 to 2.7 seconds after installing light surveillance. Imagine that.
In the Svalbard islands, floating halfway between Greenland and Norway in the Arctic ocean, researchers have begun construction of a vault designed to house seeds of all known varieties of the world’s crops, in the event of global catastrophe — a Noah’s Ark for the plant world.
The vault’s purpose is to ensure survival of crop diversity in the event of plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters or climate change; and to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out. At temperatures of minus 18C (minus 0.4F), the seeds could last hundreds, even thousands, of years. Even if all cooling systems failed … the temperature in the frozen mountain would never rise above freezing …
The vault is eventually expected to house some three million seeds. And in case any smart-alec seed thieves get bright ideas, the place is crawling with polar bears.
Question: If nobody knows where the Svalbard islands are now, how the heck do we expect the few Mad Max humans who survive to figure out where they are, or how to get there? Oh, wait – Svalbardians will probably be the only survivors anyway, so they’ll be all set.
via antiweb
Father’s Day ferry trip to Musee Mechanique in San Francisco, “one of the world’s largest privately owned collections of mechanically operated musical instruments and antique arcade machines.” Astonishing to learn just how much engineering prowess went into some of these, long before anyone had ever envisioned a programmable EEPROM. And how some of the machines had held up to decades of use with minimal maintenance (others had been completely restored). Kind of surprised that Miles was frightened by a lot of these – not like him. Behold the power of antique animatronics (Flickr set).
The collection was recently moved into a warehouse near Fisherman’s Wharf from its original home at the Cliff House, and the new environment seemed drab, kind of trashy, and unbefitting of this incredible collection.
Speaking of Devo, little-known fact about Mark Mothersbaugh: He’s been creating a mixed media postcard every day, for over 30 years. Originally created as personal diaries, they’ve become an obsession, and now go on tour with him. The postcards combine media and styles freely — painting and illustration, found objects, backing materials. Some gorgeous, some insane, but these seem to have very little scent of the kitsch of late-model Devo. Selections from the 2006 set are displayed online; not sure where to find the rest of the archive.
One of my hosting clients — who is on a dedicated server — recently reported a strange problem: Some readers of their site were getting truncated downloads on MP3 files. Eventually we nailed the problem down to users of FireFox on Windows and Mac. FireFox for Linux was fine, and other browsers were fine as well.
After a testing splurge and much hunch following, we were able to eliminate upload methods, MP3 encoding tools, and MIME types as potential culprits. But neither I nor the data center are having any luck figuring out what actually is causing it. Google ain’t helping. Here are two links to bit-identical files on two different Linux servers:
One version on Birdhouse
Another version on Newwest
In both cases, the file is 5497828 bytes, permissions are the same, the MIME type is the same (and correct), and the file command reports:
StupidMistakes.mp3: MP3 file with ID3 version 2.2.0 tag
Both were put in place with wget from the same source. But if you’re using FF Win or Mac, the second link will appear to work, but give you only a few seconds of audio.
Theories welcome.
OK, the reason for the Time Forward poll: A physorg.com piece on South America’s indigenous Aymara, who visualize the past in front of them and the future behind, indicating that even some of the most primal and seemingly universal metaphors are still human or linguistic constructs.
New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time. Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans – a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies’ orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind – the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.
The article mentions in passing that roughly half of English speakers will answer the question about a meeting being moved forward two days from Wednesday as “Monday,” the other half “Friday.” My small sampling seems to support that.
The other question is how 2000 daily visits to this site can yield only 21 respondents in two days; maybe I need to do another poll on why people don’t take polls.
via Weblogsksy
Teenagers’ latest weapon in the fight to do SMS in the classroom: stealth ringtones. Based on the principle that people lose their auditory sensitivity to higher-pitched tones as they grow older, kids have been loading up phones with what are essentially dog whistles. Ironically, the technique was spawned by a device called the Mosquito, which was designed to drive teenagers out of stores while leaving adults unfazed. The stealth ringtones backfire when used in the presence of an adult who hasn’t yet lost (all of) their high-tone sensitivity. Techdirt has more.
A .wav sample of the tone can be “heard” here — totally silent to me.