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The Media

Digitally Filtering Out the Drone of the World Cup 602

Posted by timothy from the it's-called-an-off-switch-use-it dept.
qubezz writes "World Cup soccer fans may think a hornet's nest has infiltrated their TVs. However the buzz that is the background soundtrack of the South African-hosted games comes from tens of thousands of plastic horns called vuvuzelas, that are South Africa's version of ringing cowbells or throwing rats. It looks like the horns won't be banned anytime soon though. A savvy German hacker, 'Tube,' discovered that the horn sound can be effectively filtered out by applying a couple of digital notch filters to the audio at the frequencies the horn produces (another summary in English). Now it looks like even broadcasters like the the BBC and others are considering using such filters on their broadcasts."
Privacy

FBI's Facebook Monitoring Leads To Arrest In England 329

Posted by timothy from the bomb-president-motorcade-rutabaga dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that armed police were called to a UK school earlier today after being advised of a potential threat by the FBI. The school stated that the FBI 'raised the alarm after Internet scanning software picked up a suspicious combination of words,' strongly implying that they are carrying out routine, automated surveillance of social networking sites. While in this case it does appear that there may have been a genuine threat, the story nonetheless raises significant privacy concerns."
Earth

Airplanes Unexpectedly Modify Weather 223

Posted by timothy from the send-me-some-snow-planes dept.
reillymj writes "Commercial airliners have a strange ability to create rain and snow when they fly through certain clouds. Scientists have known for some time that planes can make outlandish 'hole-punch' and 'canal' features in clouds. A new study has found that these odd formations are in fact evidence that planes are seeding clouds and changing local weather patterns as they fly through. In one case, researchers noted that a plane triggered several inches of snowfall directly beneath its flight path."
It's funny. Laugh.

Newsweek Easter Egg Reports Zombie Invasion 93

Posted by kdawson from the it-takes-braaains dept.
danielkennedy74 writes "Newsweek.com becomes the latest in a long list of sites that will reveal an Easter egg if you enter the Konami code correctly (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, enter). This is a cheat code that appeared in many of Konami's video games, starting around 1986 — my favorite places to use it were Contra and Life Force, 30 lives FTW. The Easter egg was probably included by a developer unbeknownst to the Newsweek powers that be. It's reminiscent of an incident that happened at ESPN last year, involving unicorns."
Education

MA High School Forces All Students To Buy MacBooks 1217

Posted by Soulskill from the at-least-it's-not-ipads dept.
An anonymous reader sends in this excerpt from the Salem News: "A new program at Beverly High will equip every student with a new laptop computer to prepare kids for a high-tech future. But there's a catch. The money for the $900 Apple MacBooks will come out of parents' pockets. 'You're kidding me,' parent Jenn Parisella said when she found out she'd have to buy her sophomore daughter, Sky, a new computer. 'She has a laptop. Why would I buy her another laptop?' Sky has a Dell. Come September 2011, every student will need an Apple. They'll bring it to class and use it for homework. Superintendent James Hayes sees the technology as an essential move to prepare kids for the future. The School Committee approved the move last year, and Hayes said he's getting the news out now so families can prepare. 'We have one platform,' Hayes said. 'And that's going to be the Mac.'"

Comment We purchase fuel by gallons, not miles. (Score 1) 1042

by KharmaWidow (#32516294) Attached to: 2 In 3 Misunderstand Gas Mileage; Here's Why

fuel/distance is useless for the driver. A driver says to himself when he is at the gas station, "My trip is x miles and my tank holds y gallons. How many gallons does it take to get to x?" ie mpg. x, the distance, is the constant - and desired goal. Not the available fuel.

No one gets in their car and says well, we can only go to Knotts Berry Farm because we don't have enough gas to get to Disneyland.

All you guys are doing is inverting the ratio and changing the units. Gallons versus liters is irrelevant because gal (u) = L is simply gal = (1/u)L

You have to understand the US ratio x distance per 1 fuel-unit. You guys are saying y fuel-units/100 distance. We literally say "more miles to the gallon" as a perfomance ratio. Its an encouraging statement.

Saying "less liters to the 100km" is psychologically depressing. Everyone wants "more", not "less."

How big would Billy Idol be if he sang, "In the midnight hour, I want less, less, less..."

Comment Re: The unit is linear, easy to understand!? (Score 1) 1042

by KharmaWidow (#32515752) Attached to: 2 In 3 Misunderstand Gas Mileage; Here's Why

How is mlpm easier to understand when auto efficiency and roads in the USA are measured in gallons and miles?

Wanna know a secret? MPG and miles are also linear!

"mlpm helps put the idea that gasoline is a great resource ... unlike 7-Eleven slurpees"
WTF? You think that if you sliced the unit to 1000th of a greater unit it makes it more sacred? LOL. Have you ever looked at the psychology of currency? The smaller the unit, the less people care about it. People throw pennies in the trash! I would wager that the opposite is true. If I had only 1 of something, I would treasure it more than 1000 littler somethings. I could afford to lose a few hundred of the littler somethings because if I round up I still have 1 something.

A slurpee is ~1/4 a gallon ... using your logic, we should measure fuel in "slurpees" because its a smaller unit!

YOUR ENTIRE ARGUMENT IS SUBJECTIVE to the units you are comfortable with. A liter is about 34 ounces (~1/4 gal) - or about 1 Big Gulp Slurpee and an extra sip! LOL. Europeans are already using the slurpee-unit!

If you want to make something sacred, make it expensive and harder to obtain. Like the diamond industry does. Oh, that's right they are ripping us off when it isn't necessary!

*
Regardless, the real solution to the perception problem in the post is to upgrade from a 10mpg car to a 50mpg car. Arguing that the 10-20 path saves more will only encourage people to drive 20mpg cars rather than 50 mpg cars.

These upgrade paths measure % improvement, not actual savings. A 33mpg saves more than the 20mpg car - without upgrading at all!
NASA

Senators Question Removal of NASA Program Manager 67

Posted by kdawson from the not-so-fast dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The New York Times reports that one day after the removal of NASA's head of the Constellation Program, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, chairman of the committee that oversees NASA, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, the committee's ranking Republican, have asked NASA's inspector general to look into whether the NASA leadership is undermining the agency's moon program and to 'examine whether this or other recent actions by NASA were intended or could reasonably have been expected to foreclose the ability of Congress to consider meaningful alternatives' to President Obama's proposed policy, which invests heavily in new space technologies and turns the launching of astronauts over to private companies. Congress has yet to agree to the president's proposed policy, and has inserted a clause into this year's budget legislation that prohibits NASA from canceling the Constellation program or starting alternatives without Congressional approval. The Constellation manager, Jeffrey M. Hanley, whose reassignment is being called a promotion, had been publicly supported by the NASA administrator and other NASA officials. But he may have incurred displeasure by publicly talking about how Constellation could be made to fit into the slimmed-down budgets that President Obama has proposed for NASA's human spaceflight endeavors."
Earth

BP Says "Top Kill" Operation Has Failed 768

Posted by kdawson from the unlimber-the-nukes dept.
MrShaggy sends a quote from a CBC story: "BP has scuttled the 'top kill' procedure of shooting heavy drilling mud into its blown-out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico after it failed to plug the leak. BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles told reporters on Saturday that over the last three days, the company has pumped more than 30,000 barrels of mud and other materials down the well but has not been able to stop the flow. 'These repeated pumping[s], we don't believe will likely achieve success, so at this point it's time to move to the next option,' Suttles said."
Science

What Scientists Really Think About Religion 1123

Posted by kdawson from the two-towers dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post has a book review of Science and Religion: What Scientists Really Think by Rice University sociologist Elaine Ecklund, who spent four years doing a detailed survey of 1,646 scientists at elite American research universities. The study reveals that scientists often practice a closeted faith, worrying about how their peers would react to learning about their religious views. 'After four years of research, at least one thing became clear: Much of what we believe about the faith lives of elite scientists is wrong. The '"insurmountable hostility" between science and religion is a caricature, a thought-cliche, perhaps useful as a satire on groupthink, but hardly representative of reality,' writes Ecklund. Unsurprisingly, Ecklund found that 64% of scientists are either atheists (34%) or agnostic (30%). But only five of the 275 in-depth interviewees actively oppose religion; and even among the third who are atheists, many consider themselves 'spiritual.' 'According to the scientists I interviewed, the academy seems to have a "strong culture" that suppresses discussion about religion in many areas,' says Ecklund. 'To remove the perceived stigma, we would need to have more scientists talking openly about issues of religion, where such issues are particularly relevant to their discipline.'"
Earth

Intel Sucks Up Water Amid Drought In China 386

Posted by kdawson from the nor-any-drop-to-drink dept.
An anonymous reader sends along a Bloomberg piece on Intel and the coming water wars. "Intel is going head-to-head with businesses like Coca-Cola to swallow up scarce water resources in the developing world. According a 2009 report ... 2.4 billion of the world's population lives in 'water-stressed' countries such as China and India. Chip fabrication plants in those countries, as well factories such as the soft drink giant's bottling plants, are swallowing up scarce resources needed by the 1.6 billion people who rely on water for farming. ... Li Haifeng, vice president of sewage treatment company Beijing Enterprises Water Group, told Bloomberg, 'Wars may start over the scarcity of water.' China's 1.33 billion citizens each have 2,117 cubic meters of water available to them per year.... In the US, consumers can count on as much as 9,943 cubic meters."
Space

The Sun's Odd Behavior 285

Posted by Soulskill from the to-be-fair-it-was-a-little-tipsy dept.
gyrogeerloose writes "Most of us know about the sun's eleven-year activity cycle. However, relatively few other than scientists (and amateur radio operators) are aware that the current solar minimum has lasted much longer than expected. The last solar cycle, Cycle 24, bottomed out in 2008, and Cycle 25 should be well on its way towards maximum by now, but the sun has remained unusually quiescent with very few sunspots. While solar physicists agree that this is odd, the explanation remains elusive."

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