Comment Re:Keep it Real, NYC. (Score 1) 177
Ground Kontrol awesome bar. http://www.groundkontrol.com/
Reproducing an Ancient New World Beer 175
The Edible Geography blog has an amusing piece about Patrick McGovern, the "Indiana Jones of Ancient Ales, Wines, and Extreme Beverages," and his role in the production of a 3,400-year-old Mesoamerican beer recreated from a chemical analysis of pottery fragments. "McGovern describes his collaboration with Dogfish Head craft brewers ... to create a beer based on the core ingredients of early New World alcohol: chocolate beans (in nib form, as the cacao pods are too perishable to transport from Honduras to Delaware), honey, corn, ancho chillis, and annatto. ... The result? Cloudy and quite strong (9% A.B.V.), but more refreshing than you would think: the chocolate is savoury rather than sweet, and the chilli is just a very subtle, almost herbal, aftertaste. There is almost no head."
Comment Re:Why not 2D? (Score 1) 94
Ah... No worries. It really made me think how one would read a 3D font.
Comment Re:Why not 2D? (Score 1) 94
Are you talking about the thickness of the ink on the page?
Open a book. Rotate the book to only view the thickness of the book. You could be looking at the page in four orientations: the first line of the top or bottom of the page, the first letter of each line from the left side of the page, or the last letter from the right side of the page. From the top or bottom, you could possibly read those lines, but how would you read the next line on the page? From the left or right you would be able to read one letter, maybe decipher the next letter, but you could not read the whole line. The information that the eye is trying to find, while reading, is in 2D.
Is that more clear or less clear? Could you give me an example of a font that is read by it's thickness? Can you read your computer screen from the side?
Open a book. Rotate the book to only view the thickness of the book. You could be looking at the page in four orientations: the first line of the top or bottom of the page, the first letter of each line from the left side of the page, or the last letter from the right side of the page. From the top or bottom, you could possibly read those lines, but how would you read the next line on the page? From the left or right you would be able to read one letter, maybe decipher the next letter, but you could not read the whole line. The information that the eye is trying to find, while reading, is in 2D.
Is that more clear or less clear? Could you give me an example of a font that is read by it's thickness? Can you read your computer screen from the side?
Comment Why not 2D? (Score 1) 94
I never could understand how anyone would use a 3D desktop efficiently. The user can't really move through the space. The mouse or whatever you would use currently does not have a depth function. I don't like wading through files in 2D, let alone 3D. I've done a lot of reading and none of it seems to be in 3D. As it turns out, that's what matters. The way in which I learn and do work is an abstracted 2D technology (fonts, silly). Until the alphabet takes the next step to 3D, I doubt you'll see really efficient 3D desktops. I'm not saying it won't happen, I saying I have no clue how it would work.
I'd really like to use a big 3' by 4' 2D desktop with handwriting recondition software. I would be awesome to annotate class notes, do scratch work wherever, and not lose character sheets. Yeah, you'd be sitting at a table, but don't worry. There's a tablet that you can drag your work off of or on to it.
A little OT, I've seen print in the fourth dimension i.e. scrolling signs, but never really in the third. Who gives a shit if letters have depth?
I'd really like to use a big 3' by 4' 2D desktop with handwriting recondition software. I would be awesome to annotate class notes, do scratch work wherever, and not lose character sheets. Yeah, you'd be sitting at a table, but don't worry. There's a tablet that you can drag your work off of or on to it.
A little OT, I've seen print in the fourth dimension i.e. scrolling signs, but never really in the third. Who gives a shit if letters have depth?
Toshiba Ends Incandescent Bulb Production After 120 Years 430
angry tapir writes "Toshiba has stopped production of mass-market incandescent light bulbs, putting an end to a 120-year manufacturing history of the products. The company, which is one of Japan's largest makers of lighting products, had planned to halt production next year but brought up the date by a year. It will now focus on more energy efficient products, including LED (light-emitting diode) lights, which contain a handful of white LEDs and draw a fraction of the power of incandescent bulbs."
US Intelligence Planned To Destroy WikiLeaks 555
An anonymous reader writes "This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN), 32-page US counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks (PDF). 'The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the US government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out.' It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses 'trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whistleblowers,' the report recommends 'The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site.' [As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective.] As an odd justification for the plan, the report claims that 'Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the Wikileaks.org website.' The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks — US equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay."
Write Bits Directly Onto a Hard Drive Platter? 578
kidcharles writes "I'm working on a project that requires writing bits to a magnetic hard drive platter in a completely controlled fashion. I need to be able to control exactly where 1s and 0s will appear physically on the platter. Normally when data is written to a drive the actual bits that get written are determined by the file system being used, as modified by whatever kind of error handling the drive itself is using (e.g. Reed-Solomon). All of the modern innovations in file systems and error handling are great for reliable and efficient data storage, but they are making my particular task quite daunting. My question for Slashdot: is there a way to get down to the 'bare metal' and write these bits? Any good utilities out there to do this? Obviously a free and open source solution would be preferable, but I'm open to anything at this point."
Newborns' Blood Used To Build Secret DNA Database 263
Kanel notes a summary up at New Scientist of an investigation by a Texas newspaper revealing that Texas health officials had secretly transferred hundreds of newborn babies' blood samples to the federal government to build a DNA database. Here's the (long and detailed) article in the Texas Tribune. From New Scientist: "The Texas Department of State Health Services routinely collected blood samples from newborns to screen for a variety of health conditions, before throwing the samples out. But beginning in 2002, the DSHS contracted Texas A&M University to store blood samples for potential use in medical research. These accumulated at rate of 800,000 per year. The DSHS did not obtain permission from parents, who sued the DSHS, which settled in November 2009. Now the Tribune reveals that wasn't the end of the matter. As it turns out, between 2003 and 2007, the DSHS also gave 800 anonymized blood samples to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory to help create a national mitochondrial DNA database. This came to light after repeated open records requests filed by the Tribune turned up documents detailing the mtDNA program. Apparently, these samples were part of a larger program to build a national, perhaps international, DNA database that could be used to track down missing persons and solve cold cases."
Comment Re:Where do the authors live? (Score 1) 424
Ha!
Comment Re:Where do the authors live? (Score 1) 424
In a proper libertarian society, government does not have a monopoly on force. Each Citizen has a small monopoly on force, distributing the force across the system.
OT: Lots of folks complain about businesses having monopolies. Why is okay for government to have such monopolies i.e. schools, money, possibly health care?
How Slums Can Save the Planet 424
Standing Bear writes "One billion people live in squatter cities and, according to the UN, this number will double in the next 25 years. Stewart Brand writes in Prospect Magazine about what squatter cities can teach us about future urban living. 'The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents,' writes Brand. 'Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density — 1M people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai — and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.' Brand adds that in most slums recycling is literally a way of life e.g. the Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 rag-pickers. 'Of course, fast-growing cities are far from an unmitigated good. They concentrate crime, pollution, disease, and injustice as much as business, innovation, education, and entertainment,' says Brand. Still, as architect Peter Calthorpe wrote in 1985: 'The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities.'" Reader Kanel adds this note of perspective: "Kevin Kelly is another guy who wrote about slums in a very positive light, though he was more interested in self-organisation and why cities are cool, I think. Kelly also reports on the strange trend for slum tourism. What we're seeing here is that the 'slums' have become a vehicle for people to bring out their own ideas about cities, humans, and the universe at large. I have a feeling that we're not really going to learn a lot about slums if we study them through these guys."
US Government Poisoned Alcohol During Prohibition 630
Hugh Pickens writes "Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Deborah Blum has an article in Slate about the US government's mostly forgotten policy in the 1920s and 1930s of poisoning industrial alcohols manufactured in the US to scare people into giving up illicit drinking during Prohibition. Known as the 'chemist's war of Prohibition,' the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, killed at least 10,000 people between 1926 and 1933. The story begins with ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1919, which banned sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages in the US. By the mid-1920s, when the government saw that its 'noble experiment' was in danger of failing, it decided that the problem was that readily available methyl (industrial) alcohol — itself a poison — didn't taste nasty enough. The government put its chemists to work designing ever more unpalatable toxins — adding such chemicals as kerosene, brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor to stop the poisoning program. But an official sense of higher purpose kept it in place, while lawmakers opposed to the plan were accused of being in cahoots with criminals and bootleggers. The chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, one of the poisoning program's most outspoken opponents, liked to call it 'our national experiment in extermination.'"
Major Electronics Vendors Accused of Price Fixing 125
Lucas123 writes "After the DOJ launched an investigation last fall into price fixing by major optical disk drive manufacturers, a home electronics retail store filed a class-action lawsuit this week seeking triple damages for what it is claiming to be long-standing collusion among Sony, Samsung, Toshiba, LG Electronics and Hitachi to raise and fix prices on the drives. The suit claims the vendors used trade organization forums as meeting places to discuss the price fixing. 'These are big Asian smoke-stack industries where they're investing in big fabrication plants. You can't have a technology destroy the business,' said the attorney representing the plaintiff. 'If you fire up a big fab plant with CRT tubes, and the next generation technology destroys it, then you have a big fab plant manufacturing buggy whips. So they have to make sure the price points for these [newer] technologies ... don't destroy existing markets.'"
Web Heritage Could Be Lost 128
Squiff writes "The British Library warns us that 'The UK's online heritage could be lost forever if the government does not grant a "right to archive"' in the UK. Never mind the Wayback Machine, The British Library declares that 'the average life expectancy of a website was just 44 to 75 days, and suggested that at least 10% of all UK websites were either lost or replaced by new material every six months,' with the material within them being amongst the most revealing regarding the state of contemporary culture."
