Research published in the journal Scientific Reports finds that alcohol is the deadliest recreational drug, followed by heroin, cocaine, and tobacco. Cannabis, at the bottom of the list, is 114 times less deadly than alcohol. Read the rest

Read the rest

you don’t create  n e w  w o r l d s to give them 
      all the same l i m i t s  as the old ones

clintscoffeepot:

“Depression turns you into a series of nouns, without the adjectives and without the verbs. You don’t remember where you misplaced your descriptions, your actions … You become: bed, shower, socks, coffee, keys, obligations.”— A Series of Nouns

gifsboom:

Video: Sunbathing Cats Moving with the Sun

Brian Williams got smacked around hard for his confabulation of events, in which he placed himself in a helicopter that was shot at by insurgents (he wasn’t — it was a different helicopter in a group he was flying with). But he at least acknowledged that he was wrong.

Now Bill O’Reilly has been caught in a similar exaggeration. Do you think he backed down? Oh hell no..

In a way, it’s impossible to win a debate with O’Reilly because he is not bound by reality. In response to the article, he told Fox News’ media reporter, Howard Kurtz, "Nobody was on the Falklands and I never said I was on the island, ever." Yet our article included video of O’Reilly saying in 2013, "I was in a situation one time, in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands, where my photographer got run down and then hit his head and was bleeding from the ear on the concrete. And the army was chasing us." Note the words "war zone" and "in the Falklands."

Part of our article examined his depiction of a protest in Buenos Aires after the Argentine junta surrendered to the British. O’Reilly covered that event, and in a 2001 book, he wrote, "A major riot ensued and many were killed." He has called it a "combat situation." In a 2009 interview, he recalled how soldiers "were just gunning these people down, shooting them down in the streets" with "real bullets." Yet no media reports of the event that we found referred to such dramatic violence or any fatalities. Not even the CBS News report on the protest that O’Reilly contributed to mentioned soldiers shooting and killing civilians. Erik Wemple, a media critic at the Washington Post, has examined this part of our article in detail. He, too, found that there were no news reports matching O’Reilly’s description—and that this was not "combat." He concluded that this "appears to be a  a Brian Williams-level embellishment." (Wemple is married to a Mother Jones reporter. You can watch this Washington Post video and decide if his assessment is fair.)

So he wasn’t in the Falklands — he was in Buenos Aires, 1200 miles away. He wasn’t in a war zone, he was witness to a riot…which has no corroborating evidence of violence or fatalities.

These kinds of errors of memory happen all the time, as I said before, and I would just shrug it off and see nothing significant in it, except that O’Reilly used the Williams episode to decry the corruption of left wing media, and now he’s not acknowledging his own errors, he’s howling back.

O’Reilly responded to the story by launching a slew of personal invective. He did not respond to the details of the story. Instead, he called me a “liar,” a “left-wing assassin,” and a “despicable guttersnipe.” He said that I deserve “to be in the kill zone.” (You can read one of my responses here.) And in his show-opening “Talking Points memo” monologue on Friday evening, he continued the name-calling.

No sympathy here. That just blew it.

Williams was suspended from his job for six months because of those confabulations. We’ll see how Fox News deals with greater dishonesty, but I think I can safely predict that they’ll do nothing.

Fans of classic British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf will recognize these nifty micro creations by Elspeth De Montes as the titular mining vessel and it’s diminutive companion Starbug. Note: Any readers that complain about the absence of the Blue Midget risk being branded as a… smeeeeee-HEEEEED!

 

"Spider silk is famous for its amazing toughness, and until recently a tensile strength of 1.3 gigapascals (GPa) was enough to earn it the title of strongest natural material. However, researchers report online today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface that the record books need to be updated to properly recognize the incredible strength of the limpet teeth. Marine snails known as limpets (Patella vulgata) spend most of their lives scraping a set of small teeth along rocks in shallow ocean waters, looking for food. The constant grinding would be enough to quickly reduce most natural materials to nubs, but the limpets’ teeth boast a tensile strength of between 3 and 6.5 GPa..."

Microphotograph via the Washington Post, which offers these observations:

The teeth also bested several man-made materials, including Kevlar, a synthetic fiber used to make bulletproof vests and puncture-proof tires. The amount of weight it can withstand, Barber told the BBC, can be compared to a strand of spaghetti used to hold up more than 3,300 pounds, the weight of an adult female hippopotamus.

Their secret is in the size of their fibers, which are 1/100th the diameter of a human hair. The ultra-thin filaments avoid the holes and defects that plague larger strands — including man-made carbon fibers — meaning any structure they compose is also flawless, regardless of how big it gets.

The original publication is here.

I should be the last person in to point out stupid haircuts, but get a load of Kim Jong Un, first secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea, first chairman of the National Defense Commission of the DPRK and supreme commander of the Korean People's Army, sporting a trapezoidal haircut.

sixpenceee:

Snow mounds with glow sticks inside them look really cute and maybe just a lil’ bit creepy at night. 

Goodbye, Spot.

ghostbanri:

this is hands down the most suspicious headline I’ve ever read

On Friday, February 14, actress Ellen Page speaks about the brave decision to live openly and authentically.

equinoks:

Yo did you guys see this shit

New bonus comic exclusively at The Nib!

If you're still watching cable, it turns out that channels like TBS and TNT are now speeding up syndicated programs, classics films and other shows by as much as 7 percent. We hadn't noticed it much ourselves, but the trend was spotted by Snopes and ...

by the gentleman’s armchair

forgetpolitics:

zooophagous:

platekini:

end of the world eyes

LOOK AT THIS FUCKING CAT

more like eyes that have seen through time

“

I was there. I know what Gene Roddenberry envisioned. He went on at length about it in almost every meeting. He wasn’t about technology, he was about envisioning a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out. Gene Roddenberry was one of the great Social Justice Warriors. You don’t get to claim him or his show as a shield of virtue for a cause he would have disdained.

Most of the stories we wrote were about social justice. ‘The Cloud Minders,’ ‘A Taste Of Armageddon,’ ‘Errand Of Mercy,’ ‘The Apple,’ ‘Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,’ and so many more. We did stories that were about exploring the universe not just because we could build starships, but because we wanted to know who was out there, what was our place in the universe, and what could we learn from the other races out there?

Star Trek was about social justice from day one.

”

-

David Gerrold, Author of the ST:TOS episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”

— (Source)

…I said it earlier on Facebook: David hits it out of the park once again. Go read the whole posting.

gladtoseayou:

Jeff Jackson, a young Democratic NC State senator is the only senator in the general assembly today due to the snow.

I never thought this was a sentence I’d ever say, but I think I have a new favorite state senator.

Jessica Huang gives her son “the talk.”

tetraghost:

i wish birds brought ME presents

stunningpicture:

I had too much time on my hands..

dutchster:

oh

Back in early 1990s, when I was still an un-defrocked technology guy, the corporation I worked for was aggressively courted by an East Coast technology company.  Among the many earthly delights they showed us during the pitching of the woo, was, at the time, a genuinely startling revelation about what kind of personal information was available on public and subscription databases, and how detailed and personal a profile of almost anyone could be built up by cross-referencing the right files (I remember our president was visibly discomfitted at the sight of how much detail on her personal life could be deduced from the available data pool and, upon reflection, I am not entirely sure that what we witnessed wasn't both of a dazzling display of cutting edge technology and a genteel threat leveled at our carefully-closeted boss because who knows what else we know about you?)

Since then, the situation has gotten ever so much worse at an exponential rate by search algorithms which have reached near-sentient sophistication and hundreds of millions of social media users' who have been suckered into (and have pressured their peers into) backing their personal lives up to the digital trough and dumping terabytes of shockingly personal stuff into the web.

So you can imagine what a hearty and refreshing laugh at Young Conor Friedersdorf's call for a New Birth of Internet Freedom, in which corporations neither bow to outside pressure nor use the tools with which the times have provided them to pry into your private life and use that knowledge to your detriment:

...

Meanwhile, I propose a new social norm. My strong suspicion is that we'd all be better off if Americans developed a broad aversion to people being fired for public missteps that have nothing to do with their jobs. That norm would do more good than bad even if you think some people deserve to be fired. Sure, I'd advise against taking flip photographs at a military cemetery. But whatever one thinks of that error in judgment, there's no reason it should cause a woman to lose her job helping developmentally disabled adults.

An insensitive Halloween costume may justify a dirty look or scolding or even shaming. It should not deprive someone of their livelihood! It's strange when you think about it, this notion of getting sacked as a general purpose punishment that an angry faction of the public demands of an at-first-reluctant employer. The target, the mob demands, should have to find a new job, or go on welfare, or move back in with their mom, or perhaps starve. It's not even clear what's meant to happen. Let's rethink this.

People should usually feel ashamed of themselves for thinking, "I should get that stranger fired." Companies should be left alone when one of their employees does something offensive while "off-duty." Since some Internet trolls will break that rule, here's another: Companies should expect to get more criticism for caving to the demands of trolls than for letting a briefly unpopular employee keep performing his or her duties, even amid an episode of obsessive public shaming. After all, these things always blow over, the attention span of the Internet being short, while losing one's job is, for many, a setback with consequences that last years. And have any of these firings achieved any social good? I defy anyone to produce hard evidence to that effect.

Here's what corporations should say in the future: "Sorry, we have a general policy against firing people based on social media campaigns. We're against digital mobs."

But note the one exception built into what I propose. Sometimes people do stupid things in the public eye that relate directly to their jobs. If, say, a DEA agent writes a Facebook post bragging about how many innocent black people he's going to lock up for drug trafficking next month, then it's obviously legitimate to demand his immediate termination. But generally speaking, Americans ought to be averse to the notion of companies policing the speech and thoughts of employees when they're not on the job. Instead, many are zealously demanding that companies police their workers more, as if failing to fire someone condones their bad behavior outside work. Few general standards work out best in every last circumstance. But the one I suggest would be better than what we've got.

4gifs:

I got this…I got this… [video]

The Flow Hive is a new beehive invention that promises to eliminate the more laborious aspects of collecting honey from a beehive with a novel spigot system that taps into specially designed honeycomb frames. Invented over the last decade by father and son beekeepers Stuart and Cedar Anderson, the system eliminates the traditional process of honey extraction where frames are removed from beehives, opened with hot knives, and loaded into a machine that uses centrifugal force to get the honey out. Here is how the Andersons explain their design:

The Flow frame consists of already partly formed honeycomb cells. The bees complete the comb with their wax, fill the cells with honey and cap the cells as usual. When you turn the tool, a bit like a tap, the cells split vertically inside the comb forming channels allowing the honey to flow down to a sealed trough at the base of the frame and out of the hive while the bees are practically undisturbed on the comb surface.

When the honey has finished draining you turn the tap again in the upper slot resets the comb into the original position and allows the bees to chew the wax capping away, and fill it with honey again.

It’s difficult to say how this might scale up for commercial operations, but for urban or backyard beekeeping it seems like a whole lot of fun. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine these on the roof of a restaurant where honey could be extracted daily, or for use by kids or others who might be more squeamish around live bees. You can see more on their website and over on Facebook.

Update: The Flow Hive is currently seeking funding on IndieGogo. So far they’ve raised $1.8 million dollars in 16 hours.

Snow Removal

I've long thought about putting a flamethrower on the front of a car to melt snow and ice before you drive across it. Now I've realized that a flamethrower is impractical, but what about a high-powered microwave emitter?

—Matt Van Opens

Believe it or not, your flamethrower idea is actually the more practical of the two. The flamethrower also has the advantage that, unlike the microwave, it won't interfere with wifi (unless you aim it directly at the router).

I'm writing this article from Boston, which is currently buried under a truly ridiculous amount of snow. We've had more snow in the past 30 days than Anchorage, Alaska usually gets in an entire winter.[1]Meanwhile, Anchorage is on Twitter wondering where their snow went and threatening revenge. Here's a neat visualization of the atmospheric pattern during these polar vortexes. Vortices. Whatever. Our transit system has broken down and our roofs[2]Tolkien prefers rooves. are collapsing. The mayor gave a press conference in which he announced, "I don't know what to say to anybody anymore. Hopefully it will stop eventually."

So snow removal is on all our minds.

But snow is hard to melt. (And we've been trying[3]I love that tweet because it sort of sounds like it comes from an alternate fairy-tale universe where cities farm snow and snow-melters form the base of the economy.) Your microwave idea certainly sounds like it should be more practical than a flamethrower. Microwaves seem clean and efficient; after all, we don't use flamethrowers in our kitchens.

But there's a big problem: Microwaves heat water very well, but they don't really work on ice.

Fortunately, there are other ways to get energy into the ice. In addition to your flamethrower suggestion, you could, for example, use infrared heat lamps or lasers.[4]Pick a frequency where snow has a low albedo; otherwise, the FBI may hunt you down for lasering aircraft. But whatever you use, you'll run into another problem: It takes an awful lot of energy to melt snow.

Melting a gram of snow takes about 335 joules of energy. To put that another way, a 60-watt lightbulb is capable of melting about a pound of snow an hour.

A foot of snow contains roughly the same amount of water as an inch of rain, give or take. Let's assume you've had a decent snowstorm of about a foot[5]For the record, by this standard, Boston has had a "decent snowstorm" every few days for the past month.—meaning an inch worth of water—and that you want to melt a 9-foot-wide swath while driving along at 55 mph.

Luckily, this happens to be one of those happy physics situations where we can just multiply together every number we're looking at, and the answer turns out to be the measurement we want:

\[55\text{ mph}\times1\text{ inch}\times9\text{ feet}\times\text{water density}\times335\tfrac{\text{J}}{\text{gram}}=574\text{ megawatts}\]

Unfortunately, it's not the answer we'd like. The nuclear reactor on an aircraft carrier, for example, produces less than 200 megawatts. To melt snow in front of your car, you'd need three of those.

What about your your original flamethrower idea?

Gasoline may have a phenomenally high energy density, but it's not high enough. No matter how big the tank on your flamethrower was, you'd run out of fuel constantly.

Gas mileage in the US is often measured in "miles per gallon" of gasoline. With your flamethrower guzzling fuel, your mileage would be about 17 feet per gallon.

You might be better off dropping the flamethrower entirely. Instead, take a cue from the rail agencies, who use jet-engine-powered snowblowers to clear train tracks.

In the end, it's easier to just move the snow out of your way.