In August, 1935, the good folks at Science and Mechanics reported on this remarkable caterpillar-tractor "ferry" that took holidaymakers in Bigbury, Devonshire, a quarter-mile out to sea to the Burgh Islands. If only all ferries were like this.
NOT a boat, but a caterpillar-tractor car, is this public utility, located at an English seaside resort. As shown, it holds its passengers above the waves, while picking its way over the bottom. A 24-horsepower engine operates it.
planckscale writes "Last weekend, LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) did not detect gravitational radiation in association with a gamma ray burst (GRB). The non-detection was actually a valuable contribution, as it helped to distinguish between competing models for what powers GRBs. The detector is due to be upgraded this year for even more accurate measurements. The interferometer is constructed in such a way that it can detect a change in the lengths of the two arms relative to each other of less than a thousandth the diameter of an atomic nucleus."
Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels over the years: a beautiful straight-razor that Jack brought to my talk at UC Irvine last year. Jack used an antique cut-throat razor then made his own handle using circuit boards.
Link
Here's a giant statsdump from Metafilter -- all the metadata from all of the MeFi sites. Unbelievably cool -- can't wait to see what people make of it: post stats, comment stats, favorites stats, contact data, and userids.
Link
(via Overstated)
The MPAA study that showed that students were responsible for 44 percent of film downloading? A big old lie. And now the MPAA has admitted it:
In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Association of America claimed that 44 percent of the industry's domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have access to high-bandwidth networks on campus.
The MPAA has used the study to pressure colleges to take tougher steps to prevent illegal file-sharing and to back legislation currently before the House of Representatives that would force them to do so.
But now the MPAA, which represents the U.S. motion picture industry, has told education groups a "human error" in that survey caused it to get the number wrong. It now blames college students for about 15 percent of revenue loss.
jd writes "An international consortium of specialists in genetics has announced the 1000 Genomes Project, in which at least 1,000 people from around the world will have their genomes fully sequenced as part of an effort to discover the relationship between genetics and disease. At present, over 100 regions of DNA are known to be related to illnesses, but the maps that exist are vague and are drawn from an extremely small population pool. According to the article, this results in the need for slow, expensive, and laborious studies to pinpoint causes, especially for rarer conditions. This project aims to find conditions that might only appear once in every 2,000 people (though how they intend to do that with half that number is unclear). The researchers hope to massively speed up the diagnosis of genetically linked illnesses and to improve the reliability of such diagnoses."
This vegan bread loaf has a beautiful herb baked onto its crust, glued in place with an "egg wash" made with soymilk powder and water. Full recipe and HOWTO at the link.
Link
(via Craft)
As Canadian copyfighters gear up to fight the reintroduction of Industry Minister Jim Prentice's new copyright bill -- which imports the American-style Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law, despite the DMCA's widespread abuse and total failure to reduce piracy over the past ten years -- Michael Geist has given us all a powerful weapon.
Geist has produced a list of Members of Parliament in "unsafe seats" (seats won on narrow margins) whose electoral ridings include a university or college, where one might expect to find a lot of opponents of a copyright law that makes research, development, and scholarship into legally risky activities.
As Geist points out, it's one thing for Prentice -- who has a very safe seat indeed -- to introduce legislation on behalf of American entertainment industry giants without even consulting Canadian stakeholders, but it's another thing entirely for Members like Rod Bruinooge, who owes his seat to 111 voters, and who represents the 30,000 students at the University of Manitoba.
When push comes to shove, Prentice is going to have a damned hard time getting his bill through if he doesn't talk to Canadians about what they want before he crams EMI, Universal, Sony and Warner's agenda down our throats.
Want to get involved? Join the tens of thousands of Canadians who've signed up for local Fair Copyright for Canadians groups and let your MP know what side you're on.
Link
Sun's Adam Leventhal has made a disturbing discovery about Apple's version of DTrace, a free/open debugging tool that Leventhal helps to oversee: Apple has deliberately broken DTrace to prevent it from being used to examine the inner workings of iTunes. This is presumably in place to stop people from figuring out how to break iTunes's DRM, and as Leventhal notes, it is completely contrary to the purpose and spirit of debugging tools and open source:
Wow. So Apple is explicitly preventing DTrace from examining or recording data for processes which don't permit tracing. This is antithetical to the notion of systemic tracing, antithetical to the goals of DTrace, and antithetical to the spirit of open source. I'm sure this was inserted under pressure from ISVs, but that makes the pill no easier to swallow. To say that Apple has crippled DTrace on Mac OS X would be a bit alarmist, but they've certainly undermined its efficacy and, in doing do, unintentionally damaged some of its most basic functionality. To users of Mac OS X and of DTrace: Apple has done a service by porting DTrace, but let's convince them to go one step further and port it properly.
To paraphrase Warren Buffet, DRM is the gate to hell: once you enter, you can't leave. Apple, having committed itself to preventing users from using their computers in certain ways, must now take on a further and further-reaching set of restrictions in service of that -- locking down APIs, shipping updates that downgrade the software, exposing user privacy, breaking core development tools. No end in sight -- not until Apple decides that what you do with your computer is your own business.
Link
(via /.)
A moving and intriguing Wired feature tells the story of the activists, hackers and engineers who are working to un-shred millions of hand-shredded secret files that the East German Stasi ripped to pieces in the run-up to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The secret police panicked when they realized that they were about to lose their tight rein on power and shredded as much as they could -- but they had collected more files than any other bureaucracy in the history of the world, and they couldn't shred fast enough. So they assigned a detail to go into the basement, into a secure, copper-lined computing room, and hand-tear the most sensitive documents, all day long, millions of them.
The liberators of the Stasi's archive saved the hand-shredded material and now computer scientists are working to piece it all back together, using clever algorithms reminiscent of the systems described in Vernor Vinge's groundbreaking novel Rainbows End. The description of the files themselves are incredible -- one activist had sixty binders compiled on her, comprising every movement she took (she was followed constantly by crew-cut secret police in white vans who'd crawl the curb a few metres behind her as she walked down the street).
The data for the 400-bag pilot project is stored on 22 terabytes worth of hard drives, but the system is designed to scale. If work on all 16,000 bags is approved, there may be hundreds of scanners and processors running in parallel by 2010. (Right now they're analyzing actual documents, but still mostly vetting and refining the system.) Then, once assembly is complete, archivists and historians will probably spend a decade sorting and organizing. "People who took the time to rip things up that small had a reason," Nickolay says. "This isn't about revenge but about understanding our history." And not just Germany's — Nickolay has been approached by foreign officials from Poland and Chile with an interest in reconstructing the files damaged or destroyed by their own repressive regimes...
The truth is, for Poppe the reconstructed documents haven't contained bombshells that are any bigger than the information in the rest of her file. She chooses a black binder and sets it down on the glass coffee table in her living room. After lighting a Virginia Slim, she flips to a page-long list of snitches who spied on her. She was able to match codenames like Carlos, Heinz, and Rita to friends, coworkers, and even colleagues in the peace movement. She even tracked down the Stasi officer who managed her case, and after she set up a sort of ambush for him at a bar — he thought he was there for a job interview — they continued to get together. Over the course of half a dozen meetings, they talked about what she found in her files, why the Stasi was watching her, what they thought she was doing. For months, it turned out, an agent was assigned to steal her baby stroller and covertly let the air out of her bicycle tires when she went grocery shopping with her two toddlers. "If I had told anyone at the time that the Stasi was giving me flat tires, they would have laughed at me," she says. "It was a way to discredit people, make them seem crazy. I doubted my own sanity sometimes." Eventually, the officer broke off contact, but continued to telephone Poppe — often drunk, often late at night, sometimes complaining about his failing marriage. He eventually committed suicide.
An anonymous reader writes "The Associated Press reports that in a 2005 study the MPAA conducted through an outfit called LEK, the movie trade association vastly overestimated how much college students engage in illegal movie downloading. Instead of '44 percent of the industry's domestic losses' owing to their piracy, it's 15 percent — and one expert is quoted as saying even that number is way too high. Dan 'Sammy' Glickman's gang admitted to the mishap, blaming 'human error,' and promised 'immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report.'"
cpudney writes "An article in Computerworld UK reports on a new open source analysis initiative launched by Hewlett-Packard. The FOSSology Project's mission is to 'build a community to facilitate the study of Free and Open Source Software by providing free data analysis tools.' The first such tool reports how an open source project is licensed. Rather than simply collecting a project's advertised license, the tool analyzes all of the source code for a given project and reports all of the licenses being used, based on the license declarations and tell-tale phrases that identify software licensing. A video demonstrating the tool applied to abiword is available. The FOSSology source code is licensed under GPLv2."
Geeks go crazy when you reveal cinematic secrets -- even details that anybody with half a brain could pick up from a stroll through a theater lobby. This handy guide will keep you from feeling the forum's flames -- maybe. Commentary by Lore Sjöberg.
Apple's second-quarter outlook shows it might not be shockproof, and many shareholders retreat from earlier bets on AAPL. The stock drops $17.06, or nearly 11 percent, in after-hours trading.
Apple's second-quarter outlook shows it might not be shockproof, and many shareholders retreat from earlier bets on AAPL. The stock drops $17.06, or nearly 11 percent, in after-hours trading.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Last November, EU regulators in the European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education began looking at how culture affects the economy and recommended a 'balance between the opportunities for access to cultural events and content and intellectual property' saying that 'criminalizing consumers so as to combat digital piracy is not the right solution.' Industry lobbyists, of course, immediately sprang into action to try to turn that around, writing amendments that would set up mandatory ISP copyright filters and extend EU copyrights to match the USA's life-plus-70 term. Thankfully, the committee rejected all of those amendments: 'Clearly, they're not going to let the ITRE or the European recording industry push them around, which is great news for Europeans. Now if we could only get the US Congress to show as much spine as the French (ouch).'"
Israel is worried about Iran launching an all-out, "doomsday" barrage of rockets and missiles. So military leaders have begun early planning for a new, robotic defense system, armed with enough artificial intelligence that it "could take over completely" from flesh-and-blood operators. "It will be designed for ... autonomous operations," the commander of Israel's air defense forces insists.
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Here's a giant statsdump from Metafilter -- all the metadata from all of the MeFi sites. Unbelievably cool -- can't wait to see what people make of it: post stats, comment stats, favorites stats, contact data, and userids.
Link
(via Overstated)
The data for the 400-bag pilot project is stored on 22 terabytes worth of hard drives, but the system is designed to scale. If work on all 16,000 bags is approved, there may be hundreds of scanners and processors running in parallel by 2010. (Right now they're analyzing actual documents, but still mostly vetting and refining the system.) Then, once assembly is complete, archivists and historians will probably spend a decade sorting and organizing. "People who took the time to rip things up that small had a reason," Nickolay says. "This isn't about revenge but about understanding our history." And not just Germany's — Nickolay has been approached by foreign officials from Poland and Chile with an interest in reconstructing the files damaged or destroyed by their own repressive regimes...
