Rakista

Tonight’s comic is about kittens, Big Data and food.

I have to go back to a Monday-Wednesday-Friday comics schedule for a little while. A couple of too amazing to fuck up opportunities to work with people I adore have come along and I'd kick myself if I missed them. I'll let you know about them soon as I'm able!

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While high profile privatizations have dominated the news in recent years, a new trend is quietly emerging -- communities taking public assets back under public control. The trend is most pronounced in the area of water resources. In communities across the country, people are deciding that water is just too precious to subject to the profit motive.

No state has seen more of these "reverse" privatizations than California. Today, multiple towns are fighting for-profit firms for control of the public's water. One of those firms is the New Jersey-based for-profit American Water (known as California American Water Co. or Cal Am in California).

On the scenic Monterey Peninsula, a citizen's group called "Public Water Now" makes a compelling case for public control of the peninsula's scarce water resources. Public Water Now alleges that Cal Am's long-term mismanagement of the water resources and failed efforts to secure new water resources have cost ratepayers some $100 million since 2004.

In 1995, a court ordered pumping of the area's primary water source, the Carmel River, to be cut back by 70 percent by 2017. With the deadline looming, Cal Am has failed to secure another source of water. "Cal Am has shown either poor planning, poor management, poor judgment, poor decision-making, or all of the above," says Public Water Now's website. Even though it has failed in its major responsibility to the Monterey Peninsula, the firm has raked in a steady rate of profit from peninsula residents -- 30 cents on the dollar in pretax profits for 2012.

After abandoning two prior plans for establishing desalination facilities, Cal Am has a new proposal for another "desal" plant. The project would depend on a ratepayer surcharge and a public bond offering. This would pass nearly all risks on to ratepayers say critics, but at the end of the day ratepayers would have no ownership stake in the asset.

Some peninsula residents are saying enough. They want public control of the public's scarce water resources.

When it Comes to Precious Water, Is it Better to Be a Renter or an Owner?

In the United States, 86 percent of Americans receive their water services from a publicly owned and operated utility. But for-profit firms have made inroads in recent decades and see public water as a new profit center. In 2011, Citigroup economist Willem Buiter predicted that "water as an asset class will, in my view, become eventually the single most important physical-commodity based asset class, dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals."

"Any solution to the Monterey Peninsula's serious water problem demands long term planning, long term investment and a consistent public planning process unfettered by short term demands for shareholder profitability. Public ownership and public control would make the whole process easier and remove conflicts of interest," Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of the non-profit watchdog group Food & Water Watch, told CMD.

Cal Am is "so strongly driven by pure profit that they will simply ignore more economical options," says Ron Cohen. Cohen, a successful software executive, founded the nonprofit advocacy organization Public Water Now. The group studied the situation and drafted an initiative for voters that would require the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District to pursue a public purchase of Cal Am's local assets.

"You just have to ask yourself," Cohen said, "do you want to be a renter for the rest of your life, and for generations to come, or do you want to be an owner?"

The initiative reads: "The voters of the District assert that the District should, as soon as practicable and to the extent permitted by law, pursue the acquisition of Cal Am's water system assets and infrastructure in order to deliver maximum value to ratepayers in perpetuity. Such public ownership of the water system not only will remove Cal Am's current for-profit, investor-driven bias, but will also eliminate the excessive fees, costly procedures, and burdensome jurisdictional control of the CPUC over water service on the Monterey Peninsula."

The issue will be put to the voters on the June 2014 ballot.

Cal Am Prepping for Battle

But it won't be smooth sailing for proponents of public water. Cal Am has made a lot of money on the peninsula and is not likely to go down without a fight. It successfully beat back a previous referendum on public water.

In November 2005, groups mobilized behind "Measure W," a question on the ballot that would have simply authorized a study to assess the process for a community buy-out of the water utility. To defeat the measure, Cal Am hired BNA Communication, which used direct mail, field communications, and television, radio, and newspaper advertisements to fight back. Measure W was defeated with 62 percent voting no. A judge later allowed Cal Am to pass the costs of its "public outreach" -- $1,353,831 -- onto its customers through new surcharges.

This time around, it will be different, says Cohen. First, while the previous initiative authorized only an expensive study, "the new initiative maps a direct line from passage to acquisition," says Cohen. Second, Public Water Now conducted a poll showing that two-thirds of residents were inclined to support the initiative. The group has teams geared up to go door-to-door to make the case for public control, and they are already past the halfway point on signature collection. But the biggest difference between 2005 and today is that "we have had eight more years of Cal Am and they have failed on two more occasions to solve the peninsula's water problems," says Cohen.

Scare tactics will be the company's preferred rebuttal. Cal Am representative Catherine Bowie told the local news that any public takeover will result in an eminent domain proceeding because Cal Am's assets are "not for sale." She warned that any eminent domain proceeding would be lengthy, contentious, and costly.

Eminent domain is a legal tool used by governments to purchase private property for a public purpose, such as for the construction of power lines. If homeowners don't want to sell, the government can still legally secure the property as long as it pays "fair market value."

But the threat does not bother Cohen. He points to Felton, California. In 2001, Cal Am purchased Felton's water system and a year later proposed a 74 percent rate hike. In response, residents formed an action group and petitioned Santa Cruz County to establish a public agency to exercise control over the water system. In July 2005, Felton residents voted 3-to-1 in favor of issuing $11 million in bonds and raising taxes in order to buy their water system back. The water district offered Cal Am $7.6 million, its appraised value, but the company refused, demanding $25 million. A week before the eminent domain proceeding was set to begin, however, the company settled the case for $10.5 million.

Since then, the community has steadily invested in the water system, and homeowners have saved about 30 percent on their water bills, says Food & Water Watch.

Trend Towards Public Ownership or "Municipalization"

In case you think the Monterey struggle is quixotic, you should know there is a bit of a trend in successful public takeovers or "municipalizations."

Ron Cohen explains that most of these municipalizations have to do with three issues: local control, better customer service, and better prices:

• In 2007, the city of O'Fallon, Missouri was considering selling its public water system to American Water, but delayed after public protest. In 2009, after more than two decades of contracting with private companies to run the system, the city opted for complete public provision of water. It saved 15 percent by operating the systems with public workers instead of private contractors.
• In 2008, citizens in the town of Cave Creek, Arizona took control of their water system, which had always been privately owned and operated.
• In 2001, Montara, California residents voted four-to-one in favor of a public takeover of the water system. At first, Cal Am refused to sell, but the California Public Utilities Commission and Montara Water & Sanitary jointly purchased the system in August 2003.

But there is a fourth reason as well. When Public Water Now polled peninsula residents on how they felt about a public takeover, "their number one reason was to keep the money in the local community. In the next 10 years, $300 million will be sucked off the peninsula and sent to New Jersey never to be recovered," contends Cohen.

With a public water system, any revenues raised are not forked over to distant shareholders, but are reinvested into the public system for the long term. And any desalination facility that is built will be owned and controlled by the members of the community themselves.

For the first time on the Monterey Peninsula, citizens will be owners and not renters.

 

 

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It’s Halloween season, and campy macabre aesthetic surrounds us, making the general public a little more open to the darker parts of our existence.  Reflecting back on the origin of this holiday, All Hallow’s Eve and Samhain, the pagan celebration, it’s clear that death and the unseen world is the foundation.  Our ancestors believed that the veil to the other side became thin or disappeared completely on this night, allowing the spirit world to comingle with the physical and living world. There are many people and cultures that still hold this belief and practice today.

In light of the season I began searching through aesthetically significant contemporary art that finds its foundations in death and dying.  This is Part 1 of 2 of the scope of art about death, ranging widely in medium and other interwoven themes.  Damien Hirst, Angelo Filomeno, Joel Peter Witkin, Konrad Smolenski and Doris Salcedo all embrace the subject of death and dying in a widely varied manner.  As well, all are highly revered in their own right for their individual continuums of art produced over the years.

Damien Hirst is no stranger to controversy as an artist.  He always delivers shock value well and does not shy away from creating work that makes viewers squirm.  Materials he used to create the pieces featured here range from dead flies, to animal carcasses, formaldehyde and maggots.  Hirst’s works don’t just discuss the business of birth, death and dying- they display it in action right before your eyes, in a way that some of the work nearly becomes about life itself. 

Angelo Filomeno has created brilliantly beautiful, mostly tapestry based works for many years that center on a romantically macabre obsession with death.  Having grown up around Italian weaving and Old World art, Filomeno found a way to stylize skeletons and gory content with saturated hued thread-work in an Old World-meets-Contemporary art manner.

Joel Peter Witkin is undoubtedly the reigning Emperor Supreme of dark art on death.  I recall visiting a museum solo exhibition of Witkin’s work at the ripe age of 18 (and witnessing several museum goers who couldn’t stomach the intense images).  Witkin’s work is horribly fascinating in its unabashed usage of cadavers, which are often in a state of decomposition. By using not just the human form, but actual dismembered corpses, Witkin’s work transcends all other genres in creating still life tableaus out of what is dead.  Additionally, his gelatin silver print quality is astoundingly textural in its gritty and contrasted demonstration of values.

Konrad Smolenski’s work often centers around sound, pyrotechnics and performance based elements.  His series The End has taken place in a number of private and public spaces.  Constructed out of wood and flammable materials, the piece emitted sounds of explosion while erupting in flames and burning out completely.  Its destruction signals a very literal concept to the work.  However the time-based element to the piece, while circling around a phrase that is so finite, expands upon a human sense of anticipation, fear and sensory experience of existential issues.  Smolenski expands fully on these themes in many of his other works.

Doris Salcedo’s series Atrabiliarios is a series of found shoes sewn with black surgical thread into drywall behind a veneer of cow bladder.  When mounted for exhibition, the pieces seem to be hauntingly encased within the walls.  The origin of the actual shoes in Salcedo’s work is poignant.  The shoes belonged to women who disappeared in Colombia, Salcedo’s place of origin where the military has used these tactics of silent abduction to instill fear.  While none of those disappeared are ever accounted for,  the shoes (donated to the artist by the living family members of those who have vanished) serve as a quiet, haunting and tragic meditation on the shadow that the communities live in while enduring these losses.

The post Damien Hirst And Four Other Artists Who Make Art About Death appeared first on Beautiful/Decay Artist & Design.

Tesla Motors is looking to take it to the big automotive powers in Germany, home of well known names such as BMW and Mercedes-Benz. To do this, it announced today plans for major developments there as it increases European deliveries throughout the fourth quarter and ramps up further in 2014.

Tesla founder Elon Musk, visiting the German cities of Munch and Berlin, said that his company is going to make

“a significant investment in Germany. This is a country that appreciates automotive engineering, which makes it extremely important to us. To have the Model S be well received as it enters the German market is a key step for Tesla.”

To accomplish this goal, three objectives were outlined, according to Tesla. These include:

1. The accelerated deployment of Superchargers in Germany. Within the next month, ground will be broken in locations along the corridors between Munich and Stuttgart, Munich and Zurich, Switzerland, and Cologne and Frankfurt. The network in Germany will quickly expand to include routes between Frankfurt and Stuttgart and Stuttgart and Zurich. By the end of March 2014, more than 50 percent of Germany will be covered by Tesla’s Supercharger network, with 100 percent of the country covered by the middle of the year. In fact, by the end of 2014, Germany will have more Superchargers per capita than any other country. In addition, all Supercharger stations installed in Germany will be power upgraded to 135 kW to facilitate even faster free charging for long distance travel.
2. Tesla will rapidly expand the number of service centers in Germany, with five more planned to open by the end of this year alone.
3. Free optional high speed tuning for Model S owners in Germany to optimize the car for driving on the Autobahn.

Tesla is also active in other parts of Europe, including Norway and the Netherlands.

Banksy’s scheduled art piece for today has been “cancelled due to police activity,” according to the street artist’s website.

According to Gothamist, this is what might have happened: on Monday, Banksy hired an actor to shine the show of a giant Ronald McDonald statue as part of one of his already unveiled moveable works. The statue was placed outside of a McDnalds on Essex and Delancey in the LES, where police gave the shine boy a ticket for “disorderly conduct,” as he was blocking the sidewalk and inciting a crowd to form.  Sorry, did we say “police?” What we mean is that five cop cars with ten officers showed up to take the statue away. Which is, you know, a lot.

So Banksy’s retaliation? No art today. Which seems counterintuitive, because that appears to be exactly with the NYPD wants. Still, though — five cars, guys? Isn’t there, like, a murderer you should be bothering somewhere?

Also, on an unrelated note: Is it just us or does Banksy’s cancellation notice look familiar?

Come on, tell us we’re not the only one who sees the resemblance. It’s almost the same font!

(via The Verge, images via The Iron Giant, Banksy and Arrested Development)

Meanwhile in related links

• Well, you know what they say: great artists steal
• We have a new sculpture we would like to show those cops
• This sculpture’s pretty great, too, for Transformers reasons

The brand new Star Wars animated series Star Wars Rebels just released the very first, all new villain for the Empire. Take a gander at the Inquisitor.

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It's now very clear Ted Cruz is very popular among the those who frequent the Family Research Council's 2013 Values Voter Summit: he won the straw poll measuring early presidential candidates by more than 200 votes. Cruz tallied an astonishing 317 votes from the ultra conservative crowd. The next five candidates who came after Cruz -- Dr. Ben Carson, Sen. Rick Santorum, Sen. Rand Paul, Sen. Marco Rubio and Congressman Paul Ryan, respectively -- only had 319 votes between them. 

Outsiders finish 1-2-3 RT @mikememoli: Full Values Voter straw poll results, with @SenTedCruz clear winner pic.twitter.com/RiCFjg0ByD

— Reid Wilson (@PostReid) October 12, 2013

That's a pretty great way for the Republican lightning rod to close out the conference after his speech was interrupted by immigration reform protestors. CBN News is calling Cruz the "rock star," and Family Research Council chief Tony Perkins appointed him as the Tea Party's next big thing:

"The Values Voter straw poll reveals what conservative, Republican-leaning voters are looking for in a potential candidate. Values voters are looking for those who will refuse to be bound by the 'can't mentality' of the establishment and will challenge the status quo. In short, values voters, many of whom did not fully engage in the last election, are looking for a leader that will inspire them by challenging President Obama and speak clearly and directly to the challenges facing America."

Not everyone loves Ted Cruz. The Tea Party loves Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz loves Ted Cruz. But a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll says only 14 percent of Americans view Cruz favorably right now. Within that 14%, though, he's quite popular. 

Tagged: Literature, Mark Twain

Sadly, The Venture Bros. won't return for its sixth season until January 2015. But the creators may release an hour-long special in 2014 to assuage our Monarch-withdrawal.

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IBM and Semtech Corp., a leading supplier of analog and mixed-signal semiconductors, today announced a significant advancement in wireless technology, combining IBM software and Semtech hardware to create a system capable of transmitting data up to a distance of 15 km (9 miles), depending on the environment, with significantly improved ease-of-use.

Fast Growth Projected for Internet of Things

Over the next 15 years, the number of machines and sensors connected to the Internet will explode creating what is called the Internet of Things. According to IMS Research,
1) there will be more than 22 billion web-connected devices by 2020
2) These new devices will generate more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data every day
3) while every hour enough information is transported on the Internet to fill seven million DVDs.

To make wireless sensor networks (WSN) easier to program and use, IBM has developed a software development kit — called Mote Runner — which provides an open and programmer-friendly platform to connect sensor and actuator motes.

This platform is now available on the Semtech SX1272 RFIC to create a system capable of covering a range of 15 km (nine miles) in a semi-rural environment and up to five km (three miles) in dense urban environments. For comparison, the maximum distance today of a smart-meter transceiver in Europe, utilizing FSK modulation, is between one and two kilometers (1.2 miles).

Read more »

Sleepy Hollow has become a hit in the new fall season and is bringing FOX its highest numbers since the espionage series 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland as agent Jack Bauer, made its entrance into viewers consciousness in 2001.

The series ranks higher for the network than Sutherland’s drama did among young adults, which is an accomplishment in it of itself.

The sci-fi/mystery drama is a revival of the movie of the same name which starred Johnny Depp as awkward physician Ichabod Crane.

This time around, casting executives were smart enough to choose a not-so-known British actor, Tom Mison to play the central role. He has fast become the reason why many are watching the series. Especially women.

Mison’s portrayal of the time traveler Crane is quite different from Depp’s character. A revolutionary war soldier, this version finds Ichabod in present time, smack in the initial stages of some strange happenings taking place in the otherwise quiet town.

Through flashbacks and Crane’s own recounting, later in the first episode, we find out the reason why he lands in Sleepy Hollow at this time.

Icahabod has “killed” one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who turns into the Headless Horseman, following orders from General Washington himself and is resurrected 200 years later in the mysterious town.

This prompts Headless to come back too life as well, because of their sharing of their blood in the deadly battle all those years ago.

What ensues is gruesome crimes, which in the opening episode include that of the Sheriff himself. Enter Nicole Beharie, who plays the very smart and strong headed Lt. Abbie Mills.

During the investigation of the murder, Mills comes across Crane and she realizes he can be very helpful in their investigation. However, it is apparent all is not as it should when it comes to the handsome Ichabod, starting with his period attire.

Sleepy Hollow has moments of humor, especially when Crane is surprised by modern technology or lingo and when he questions the possibility that an black woman can have any kind of position of authority.

According to Zap2It.com the series premiered with 25 million viewers throughout all platforms including DVR, VOD, and live stream, and it continues to do well for Fox in subsequent episodes, especially considering it goes against the second hour of the popular reality TV musical competition The Voice, in the 9pm slot.

In 2001, 24 recorded 8.6 million viewers, which of course did not include all the mediums offered today. Subsequent season saw an increase in viewership and it went on to become an award winning series for the network.

Sleepy Hollow has been renewed for a second season to the delight of its many new followers. Tom Mison has certainly been a pleasant surprise and was described as, “tall, dark, and British” in the last episode by Abbie’s sister Jenny Mills. The chemistry with Nicole Beharie is working so far.

Are you watching Sleepy Hollow? Let us know your thoughts.

[Images via Sleepy Hollow/Facebook/Fox]

‘Sleepy Hollow’ Is First Hit Of Fall Season For Fox [Photos] is a post from: The Inquisitr News

The website called Silk Road, referred to as “the eBay for drugs,” has been seized by US federal agents according to the New York Times and other outlets. Silk Road has been used, successfully and discreetly, by countless people around the world since February 2011. Operating as an above-ground source for a variety of drugs, ranging from marijuana to heroin and virtually everything in between, Silk Road created a safe environment, free of weapons and violence during the transaction, where people could acquire drugs.

The shutdown of Silk Road is intended to curtail organized drug use and sales is designed to get headlines – but won’t accomplish much. Silk Road is not the only website of its kind and its displaced users will likely either turn to a competitor site or seek out drugs in other ways. This approach to fighting the war on drugs has never worked and it’s not likely to start working now. It is becoming increasingly common knowledge that the drug war as we know it is a failure.

For over two years, countless people around the world accessed the site, spending an estimated $1.2 billion in BitCoins, the majority of it being spent on drugs. And it all happened without much fanfare. People bought drugs from drug sellers with products that had been rated by other consumers, people consumed their drugs, life went on. If drugs were not prohibited substances, none of this would be remarkable. It’s only that the drugs in question were illegal that makes any of this headline news.

A number of steps were required to participate in the Silk Road marketplace—a marketplace that existed parallel to the visible Internet on the ‘deep web,’ accessed via the anonymization network Tor. It took quite a bit of legwork, generally involving creating a bogus email address, acquiring BitCoins, in some cases establishing a separate bank account. It was do-able, of course, but no one did it on the spur of the moment and those who used the site did so at risk of being detected.

Even with all the hurdles and the risks, people chose to use Silk Road rather than rely exclusively on whatever illegal and potentially dangerous drug market existed in their ‘real world’ community. The site’s success reinforced that people who are dependent or addicted can make rational choices, even if we like to imagine them as being totally irrational. Given the choice of quickly and easily accessing drugs in potentially sketchy or dangerous neighborhoods, or buying them safely on-line but having to wait, many users prefer privacy, security and a wait to the alternative.

Rather than a heinous crime, using Silk Road could be seen as a more responsible approach to drug sales, a peaceable alterative to the deadly violence so commonly associated with the drug war. Amir Taaki, an advocate for BitCoin, the electronic currency used to complete transactions on Silk Road, said in an interview quoted in the Guardian, “People want drugs. The drug war is probably a failed war. I want to get rid of cartels. The way to do that is for people to buy their drugs straight from the producer. That’s what’s cool about things like Silk Road—you can bypass gangs.” The Guardian also reports advocates of Silk Road asserting that the website ‘provided drugs of a higher purity-with therefore fewer potentially dangerous contaminants—in a safer way than traditional drug-dealing.’

Just this week, research published in the BMJ Open confirmed what millions have been saying for years: the drug war is a misguided effort, at best, to address problems related to drug consumption and sales. The researchers state:

“With few exceptions and despite increasing investments in enforcement-based supply reduction efforts aimed at disrupting global drug supply, illegal drug prices have generally decreased while drug purity has increased since 1990. These findings suggest that expanding efforts at controlling the global illegal drug market through law enforcement are failing.”

Seizing and shutting down Silk Road will do nothing to stop demand for drugs, nor will it end drug sales or drug use. It won’t help anyone get into treatment, it won’t teach anyone about dangerous combinations of drugs. You know it, I know it, the federal government knows it, the leaders of countries around the world know it. We all know that our whole approach to drug prohibition has been a failure.

 

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Some libertarians (usually the dimmer internet ones) actually think that the non-aggression principle does argumentative work in favor of a libertarian theory. But it clearly doesn’t. Watch. Suppose I come on to some piece of ground that you call your land. Suppose I don’t believe people can own land since nobody makes land. So obviously [...]

AMERICA’S government has shut down for the first time since 1996. This is not quite as dramatic as it first sounds: essential services will be maintained and pensioners will still get their Social Security checks as the freeze applies only to discretionary spending. But it is astonishing nevertheless. For months the working assumption among politicos has been that a last-minute deal, even an anticlimactic one which merely delayed the reckoning, would be done. This turns out to have been wrong.

Until Congress can pass a continuing resolution to fund the government some 800,000 federal workers will go unpaid, all national parks, monuments and museums will close. To get a sense of where the line between essential and non-essential services falls consider NASA. The agency will close but mission control, which supports astronauts on the International Space Station, will remain open. The economic impact of all this depends entirely on how long the shutdown lasts, which, given that few people expected it to occur, is hard to gauge.

How did this happen? The Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate have...Continue reading

Located in the La Serena neighborhood of Mar del Plata, Argentina, the well-known yet now abandoned Ariston Hotel was designed and constructed in 1948 by the Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer, a great diffuser of the modern movement in architecture. Originally meant for housing social reunions, dances and cocktail parties, this project is notable for its elevated volume with a curving, clover-inspired form that permits maximum glazing.

The Ariston Hotel is an icon of modern architecture in Argentina, distinguishing itself with its curved forms that allow for constant visual contact with the diverse landscape of dunes and sea.

Thanks to this form and the large windows that cover each curve of the building, it is possible to look outward in a continuous and integrated manner. With openings on every 3 panels, the hotel also receives good cross ventilation.

The concept of the geometry of the clover, which came about from the collaboration with architects Carlos Coire and Eduardo Catalano, was accomplished by overlapping panels along the form of a rounded cross.

This rounded volume is elevated on 4 pillars, a recurring motif in modern architecture, where form follows function. Unlike other buildings of that era, however, Breuer decided that in order to lighten loads, he would use tiles made from volcanic lava.

The faculty of Architecture at UBA contacted architects to generate a project that would revitalize the area south of Mar del Plata and return it to its previous prestige.

Currently students of architecture are working towards the recovery of this architectural landmark through the Facebook page: Recuperamos el Ariston – or Bring Back the Ariston.

Architects: Marcel Breuer
Architect In Charge: Marcelo Breuer
Design Team: Carlos Coire and Eduardo Catalano
Year: 1948
Photographs: Courtesy of Plataforma Arquitectura

Reference: Plataforma Arquitectura

Right now, as any smartphone owner knows, a phone or tablet will either use Wi-Fi or 4G or 3G—and never at the same time. So your streaming video may cut out because the network you were using dropped, even though there’s another signal available.

Multipath TCP could change this by divvying up those video bits across two or more networks. “Multipath” refers to using more than one wireless route, and TCP refers to the protocols used by most Internet traffic. Then, to use a simplified explanation—all “odd” packets (units of data that make up an Internet transmission) get sent over Wi-Fi and “even” ones over 4G. Then these “odd” and “even” packets get woven back, zipper-like, on the phone.

But in practice, it’s not that simple. The problems start with the fact that data-transmission takes longer from a cell tower than it does from a Wi-Fi router. Throw satellite streams in and the transmission delays are even longer.

Multipath TCP makes up for this by tweaking transmission speeds. But matters get more complicated if you are moving around, meaning those timings are always changing—and worse still, if some packets drop out. When those things happen, the computation required for multipath processing can get so complex that it actually slows down the overall speeds, says Medard.

Apple may be using the technology to simply enable Siri to switch back and forth between them without user intervention, so it can avoid having to retransmit your spoken request, a source of delays.



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Scientists have, for the first time, obtained actual images of one of the most important interactions in the world – the special type of chemical bond called the hydrogen bond, which keeps our DNA together and gives water its unique properties. Using a technique called high-resolution atomic force microscopy (AFM), researchers in China have managed to visualize this bond.

Hydrogen bonds are all over nature, and they’re a vital part of our day to day lives. When a tiny hydrogen atom bonds with a much bigger atom, like nitrogen or oxygen (for example in water), the larger atom pulls away some of the hydrogen’s negative charge, leaving it with a positive charge on one edge. The hydrogen, which has a partial positive charge tries to find another atom of nitrogen or oxygen and is attracted to the partial negative charge. Now, researchers have successfully visualized a molecule called 8-Hydroxyquinoline, an organic compound.

We have been familiar with the theoretical model of these bonds for quite a long while, but it’s the first time we got to see how it really looks like. The left hand column shows column shows the actual microscope images, while on the right hand we have the ball-and-stick models. The red molecules are oxygen and the blue are nitrogen and the white are hydrogen.

A different group of researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory used a similar method in May to capture the first images of covalent bonds – the chemical bond that involves the sharing of electron pairs between atoms.

The first actual images of hydrogen bonds is a post from ZME Science. (c) ZME Science - All Rights Reserved.

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HAPPY OCTOBER

An MP for Bangladesh's main opposition party is sentenced to death for charges including murder and genocide during the 1971 war of independence.

[Click here to view the video in this article]



Designers Talia Radford and Jonas Bohatsch have created a photobooth that only takes a picture when its subjects kiss or make skin contact.

Called ‘Thermobooth’, the fun party addition puts a new spin on the traditional photobooth experience to get guests to interact.

It has a shutter release system that’s triggered only when two or more people make skin contact.

To have a picture taken, users first have to stand on the “smart carpet” connected to a MaKey MaKey circuit board.

By making skin contact through a touch or kiss, the electrical circuit would be complete—this triggers the OLED lights that act as a flash to go off, the camera to capture the picture, and the printer to print a lo-fi instant thermal-printed photo.

Watch the video below to see how it works:


















[via Thermobooth]

On the occasion of the release of Around the Bay: Man-Made Sites of Interest in the San Francisco Bay Region, a new photobook from the Center for Land Use Interpretation Amelia Taylor-Hochberg sat down for a Discussion.

News

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Over at Metropolis Magazine’s POV blog, Andrew Caruso AIA, NCARB, LEED AP BD+C, CDT, spoke with Thom Mayne re:  his early years working at Pasadena redevelopment agency and Gruen, starting Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) with his friends and colleagues from Pomona and working with clients like the GSA or "innovation" seeking clients in China. One quote that jumped out was this "I divide ar...

A last little sip of summer - blueberry and gin cocktail.

(Still thirsty? See Liqurious)

Like Italian designer Federico Mauro, French illustrator Nicolas Bannister recognizes the importance of footwear in pop culture—his new poster series ‘Movie Shoes’ features some of the most iconic shoes in cinematic history.

From Dorothy’s pair of ruby red slippers from Wizard of Oz to Marty McFly’s futuristic self-lacing Nike sneakers that has its own cult following, the posters depict these well-known footwear on the feet of their equally famous wearers.

Bannister has also taken care to illustrate the legs and shoes in appropriate poses, to bring out the characters’ personalities.

View the rest of the ‘Movie Shoes’ series below—or check out the illustrator’s Facebook page for more of his work.























[via Mashkulture]

Packaging design and branding company Stranger & Stranger has designed a beautiful line of square bottles for wine company Truett Hurst.

Called ‘California Square’, these bottles will take up “less space” on wine shelves and will allow consumers to save on cardboard boxes, which are used during shipping and storage.

“Square bottles take up less space but you never see them on the wine shelves,” said the company. “If the wine industry turned over to square instead of round bottles we’d save almost a million trees in outer cardboard boxes alone. Not to mention savings in shipping and storage.”

Besides their smart functionality, the bottles are also wonderfully designed with vintage typography and glass embossing.

Check them out below:











[via The Dieline]

Noritaka Minami is an artist based in Boston and Los Angeles. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004 where he studied Art Practice and Asian American Studies. via Photography Blog.

Guido Barilla has filmed a video apology (see embed above) after his remarks about gay families created an international controversy and a possible boycott of his company’s products.

On Italian radio Wednesday evening, Barilla said that only traditional families would appear in his pasta commercials. Said the Chairman, “For us the concept of the sacred family remains one of the basic values of the company. I would not do it but not out of a lack of respect for homosexuals who have the right to do what they want without bothering others … [but] I don’t see things like they do and I think the family that we speak to is a classic family.”

When questioned about the reaction his remarks would have on potential customers, he said: “Well, if they like our pasta and our message they will eat it; if they don’t like it and they don’t like what we say they will … eat another.”

Barilla subsequently issued a statement of apology for offending anyone and that also noted that he supports gay marriage. An apology was also posted on the Barilla US Facebook page.

The controversy apparently did not abate, and perhaps owing to a firestorm of criticism on social media, a video apology was released on Facebook and YouTube.

In the video apology, Guido Barilla explains that “Yesterday I apologized for offending many people around the world. Today I am repeating that apology. Through my entire life, I’ve always respected every person that I’ve met including gays and their families, without any distinction. I’ve never discriminated against anyone. I have heard the countless reactions around the world to my words, which have depressed and saddened me. It is clear that I have a lot to learn about the lively debate concerning the evolution of the family. In the coming weeks, I pledge to meet representatives of the groups that best represent the evolution of the family, including those who have been offended by my words.”

Guido Barilla controls the fourth-generation family headquartered in Parma, Italy, with his two brothers.

Barilla CEO Apologizes For Anti-Gay Remarks [Video] is a post from: The Inquisitr News

Tagged: Art, Books, men reading, Readers, René Magritte

The breathlessly awaited Saturday meeting of House GOP caucus is over, and we now know what these feral children want in exchange for not blowing up the American economy:

 The federal government on Saturday barreled toward its first shutdown in 17 years after House Republicans, choosing a hard line, demanded a one-year delay of President Obama’s health care law and the repeal of a tax to pay for the law before approving any funds to keep the government running.

In all the talk about defunding or delaying Obamacare, there’s one thing that hasn’t been discussed  much, certainly not by the Village.  That would be what  delaying Obamacare would actually mean in the real world.

There, we’re looking at dead Americans, needlessly and avoidably cut down before their time.

Here’s the train of thought behind that claim:

The primary goal of the health care reform is to cover as many Americans who lack insurance as possible. As of this year, that is in the neighborhood of 48 million people — roughly 15% of the total US population.  Under the terms of the ACA, that number will be cut by 14 million next year, with more to come as the law persists.  That’s still well short of the goal for a civilized society, in my view, but 14 million people with access to health care is a real and important social and ethical good (not to mention an economic plus, in many analyses).

Those 14 million people — 14 million individual human beings with hopes and aspirations and real desires to avoid pain, misery and worse — are the primary victims of the morally bankrupt cabal that calls itself the House Republican caucus.  If they were to get their way and either fund the government or commit to allow the Treasury to continue to meet obligations already undertaken only on condition that those 14 million must once again go without health care coverage then the suffering that follows is on their heads.

In that context, it’s important to note that this means that the House GOP caucus will thus almost certainly be guilty of causing some significant number of unecessary, premature deaths.  The study of the connection between mortality and health insurance status is somewhat complicated, and a couple of very well publicized studies recently [PDF] have suggested that there isn’t any correlation and/or that Medicaid coverage in particular makes things worse.  Those studies and even more, the trumpeting by such deep thinkers as our old friend, Megan McArdle, have in their turn been strongly criticized, to put it mildly, and they are outliers against a background of some decades of work that show real and deadly links between whether or not you are covered and whether or not you die.

To put this all in a nutshell, take a look at the good recent-ish summary of the state of play of the uninsurance-death argument  comes from Dr. David Gorski writing in the Science Based Medicine blog.  The key point:

analysis of survey data from patients who were uninsured but then became old enough to be enrolled in Medicare suggests that “acquisition of Medicare coverage was associated with improved trends in self-reported health for previously uninsured adults, particularly those with cardiovascular disease or diabetes.” In summary, there is a large and robust body of evidence suggesting that people do, in fact, die because of lack of health insurance.

…

J. Michael McWilliams, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Health Care Policy and Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an associate physician in the Division of General Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital … speculates:

How many lives would universal coverage save each year? A rigorous body of research tells us the answer is many, probably thousands if not tens of thousands. Short of the perfect study, however, we will never know the exact number.

In other words, it’s hard given our current state of knowledge to point to John Doe over there, and say that lack of coverage killed him.  The Republican House doesn’t have to worry about answering a bill of indictment charging them in Mr. Doe’s murder.  But next year, were the House Republican branch of the Bolshevik party to succeed in delaying (or killing) health care reform, the some significant number of uninsured Does and Roes will die.  My truly primitive back of envelope calculation yields an estimate  of the number to be sacrificed to meet Republican Congressional priorities in the single digit thousands.  Let’s just say the death toll would be on the scale of  a couple of 9-11s.

The men who flew planes into the towers were terrorists.

What, then, should we call the House Republican Caucus, and their Ted Cruz-led Senate colleagues?

As our Roman friends would have said:  “res ipsa loquitur.”

One more thing:  Factio Grandaeva Delenda Est.

Image: Josse Liefernixe, St. Sebastian interceding for the plague-stricken,  1497-1499.

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