I used to be a big fan of india ink, until I spilt a jar...boy does it ever make a mess.

Traditional india ink was often just lamp-black (carbon) mixed into gelatine and water. It behaves fairly similar to blood, with problems of globs, dry tip; you just learn how to work with this until it's second nature. Sorta like how gel-ink pens refuse to write unless the pen is held at just the right angle (which, I think partly because of my weird lefty grip, I've yet to figure out). Blood seems to flow a bit better using natural quills as opposed to metal nibs. So long as you dip the pen in alcohol or diluted acetone and blot it dry, on ocassion, it's really not too bad to write in. If you really wanted non-coagulating ink, you could always add coumadin. Just don't eat it or you might, ya know, die.

The problem with blood is that over time, it deteriorates until only the tiny traces of iron from the hemoglobin remain visible. This can be pretty difficult to read.

Oak gall ink is lots of fun. It's neat to see it change color as it cures.

Also too bad that, like all the "battery breakthrough" articles, this one has no real content beyond a bunch of unsubstantiated claims and the name of a startup company with nothing but a placeholder website.

I'm not quite as quick to call bullshit on this claim as I am with the articles claiming to solve the energy crisis. I spent four years writing code for modules that interacted directly with bastations, but without even a taste of a technical explaination why there is something wrong with the amplifier, it's a coinflip.

I wish this sort of journalism came with citations, so I could no for certain whether the author is dumbing things down to avoid scaring away the non-technical audience, or because they are lazy bastards who copy-pasted a press release without bothering to investigate if there was any validity to the claims.

"Whatever he is now"? He's the "Mad prophet" Howard Beale from the movie Network. Which was a pretty clever idea to steal, ratings wise. He has unashamedly admitted this relationship in the past.

Articles on these types of "futuristic" technology projects so rarely take the time to explain the challenges involved in making it a viable tool. This article did. That was refreshing.

Long way to scroll for a serious answer. Wow.

Adding to this, there is a wide variety of acoustic soundproofing panels. Modern professional soundproofing panels are often made from melamine foam, cut to different shapes to best absorb different waveforms and frequencies. For the hacker, you can make these yourself by cutting up bits of Mr. Clean Magic Erasers.

I had similar problems with my recently purchased house. I found that a lot of the noise was actually due to amplification from echoes in my house. If you find that acoustic foam isn't the decor you wish, you can also benefit quite a bit from putting up fabric tapestries. Quilts also do a fine job.

Beyond that, your mind eventually starts to tune out the noise. So long as you aren't trying to record audio, this does a surprisingly good job.

The same fears happened when vinyl pleather first came out. The same fears happened when man-made diamonds became feasible. The market adjusts. The skins still get sold, and the price of the original commodity usually doesn't drop as much as people fear.

As I understand it, high amplitude low frequencies would purposefully be filtered out for vinyl as they cause the needle to jump out of the track.

Well put. Adding on to this, If you're recording a performance that you just intend to mixdown and play back, you can do perfectly fine at 96. 192 is only beneficial if you are doing some serious timestretching. That being said, the ability to do serious timestretching can be extremely useful. And if you're just listening to the playback, even 44.1 is overkill.

That said, I love all the crazy technology, because I never get tired of watching the audiophiles lie to themselves about this or that.

I understand your point, but still...this is IMHO the most inane summary I have read in quite awhile. The entire thing is synthesis of data by the submitter; the articles are completely unrelated beyond the term "QR Code", and as EVERYONE points out, the logic-fail is pretty easy to spot. Would it have been so hard to just rewrite the summary to discuss the first part, and leave out the conjecture bullshit?

I find that category to be extremely variant. I've worked with plenty of Electrical Engineers turned software developers, and a couple physics majors turned software developers. Some of them are great, and are up to speed with all the best practice concepts in the development world. And some of them specialize in writing horrible unmaintainable code with a strong, "who cares, it works!" attitude. That isn't to say I haven't met my share of CS people who do the same, I just think it's at least a little less common.

They use the visual nature of the graphing calculator to teach kids the concepts; particularly those of Algebra II and precalc. Once you understand them, this graphing ability becomes much less useful in the real world; outside of putting together the sort of presentation graphs that are done in MS Excel or other spreadsheet software. But as far as better calculating software, it is used in various math/sciences; it's called Matlab.

Best buy carries them for $105, not $50. And yes, by "price controlling" I wasn't trying to refer to government enforced ceilings on the prices of certain goods. I'm a software engineer, not an economist.

Being Junk is debatable. What matters is they retail for $100 and up, and scores of high school math courses require them. My Algebra II class (in 1998) might as well have been retitled to "How to use your TI-83 calculator" Class tutorials often worked buttonpress by buttonpress. I lost 3 of them over the course of my high school career (two were stolen from my bookbag), and this was certainly no fun for my parents.

Yes, I realize the older models sell for cheap on ebay. I purchased my 3rd this way and still have it (I suspect it was stolen too), but when you've got an assignment due tomorrow, and even if you get an extension from the teacher, you risk falling behind, so you often bite your lip and pay Best Buy prices.

I wish they weren't so expensive. They shouldn't be. With the exception of some tiny crappy memory expansions, they haven't changed in like 20 years, yet the price tag has only gone up. I'd love to see some project like OLPC destroy this monopoly.

Please tell me where to get a TI-83 for $50 at a brick and mortar establishment. It is the only bit of technology I know that has been able to maintain it's $100 price tag for twenty years. This is one of the stupidest bits of price controlling ever perpetrated.

It feels that way since it has only like 2 lines of conversation memory/context, but to be sure, it is recording answers. If you repeatedly ask the same question, you can get the same answer twice. You can also check out things like its extensive knowledge of Pokemon. Random users are only going to occasionally know how to respond to Pokemon queries. Cleverbot pretty much always does.