Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, is calling for new surveillance powers in the wake of the recent shootings in Paris. Speaking at a public event in the UK this morning, Cameron outlined the government’s stance on secure communications that can’t be read by police or government agencies. "In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which […] we cannot read?" he asked, comparing letters and phone conversations to encrypted communications used online, adding that "we must not" allow a means of communication where individuals can communicate in secret over the internet.

Cameron’s comments call into question whether the UK government would seek to limit popular services like WhatsApp or Apple’s...

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Entomologists aren't like you and me; they're way more comfortable with truly disgusting stuff. Which is why not one but two entomologists recently announced that they had incubated parasitic bot flies under their skin. On purpose.

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The next time the cops are hot on your heels, remember the "bootlegger's K-turn" so you can get away without the other car crashing into you.

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Apple has seemingly ended its weekly iTunes "Single of the Week" promotion that gave out a free music single download each week on the iTunes storefront. As noted by Business Insider, a member of the Apple discussion forums claims an Apple support employee informed him the company decided to drop the weekly promotion.

I contacted iTunes Support and they told me the decision was made to drop the free Single of the Week. Seems they don't want people browsing the Store anymore. I told them that the free single each week got me to the Store and I usually bought a few songs. Now, there's less reason to go. They've stopped the free single in other countries too.

The "Single of the Week" promotion began in 2004, and in a similar vein to Apple's "App of the Week" promotion on the App Store, it gave out free singles every week from artists and bands of varying genres and popularity. Though forum user Bob Foss' confirmation of the promotion's end remains unverified, Apple also recently decided to end its annual "12 Days of Christmas" iTunes Store giveaway.

Volunteers in our forums have tracked the free iTunes Store content in several countries for a number of years, but the 2015 music thread remains empty as evidence of Apple's apparent decision to cancel the promotions.

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Responsive web design is a technique used by web builders where the design adapts to different screen sizes. Designer Joe Harrison has built a page with responsive logos for several well-known brands, including Coca-Cola, Nike, Disney, and Levi's. If you resize the page, you can see the logos change. Here's how the Disney logo looks as your browser window gets smaller (from L to R):

As the browser gets smaller, the logos lose detail and become more abstract. By the time you get to the smallest screen width, you're down to just the Disney "D" or Nike swoosh or Heineken red star, aka the bare minimum you need to render the logo recognizable, if only on a subconscious or emotional level. Which reminds me of Scott McCloud's discussion of iconic abstraction (and The Big Triangle) in Understanding Comics, which is still one of the best books on design and storytelling I've ever read. Here's a bit of the relevant passage:

Defining the cartoon would take up as much space as defining comics, but for now, I'm going to examine cartooning as a form of amplification through simplification. When we abstract an image through cartooning, we're not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential "meaning", an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can't.

The reason why those particular logos work responsively is because they each have abstract representations that work on that meaningful emotional level. You see that red Levi's tag or Nike swoosh and you feel something.¹ I think companies are having to design logos in this way more frequently. Contemporary logos need to look good on freeway billboards, on letterhead, as iOS icons, and, in the case of the Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest logos, affixed to tiny tweet/like/pin buttons. (via ministry of type)

1. I've talked about this elsewhere, but in designing the "identity" for kottke.org (such as it is), having an abstract logo identifying element has been an important part of the process. I wanted to have an element (currently the blue gradient) that if you saw it and recognized it, you had a reaction to it on a emotional level. Here's what I wrote about an older kottke.org design: "The yellow-green thing at the top is a tag. Like the red tag on Levi's jeans or even the red stripe on Prada shoes. It's small, out of the way, but when you see it on something, you know exactly what you're holding in your hands." It's my favorite design trick and likely influenced by Understanding Comics more than I realize. ↩

Tags: books   design   Joe Harrison   logos   Scott McCloud   Understanding Comics

Proper punctuation is key to written communication, but it can be difficult to master. The Punctuation Guide is a webapp that teaches you to use punctuation appropriately. Just click on a punctuation mark to read all about how to use it.

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If you haven't personally had to lay down and slide into a CT scanner, you've probably seen one on television. They're super X-ray machines that put image "slices" together from head to toe to create a 3D representation that lets doctors see detail inside your body. And General Electric's new machine is incredible.

In a blog post about its Revolution CT, introduced in 2013, GE has posted a bunch of GIFs and images that show its scanner in action. Doctors are apparently happy with the new device, first introduced for real-world use last September, as it's designed to emit less radiation and provide more comfort for patients.

The results of the new CT machine are haunting, gruesome, and marvelous. But we'll let them speak for themselves.

...

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Saturday morning, SpaceX launched its fifth cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station, part of a collaboration with NASA.

But this time SpaceX, nearly did something unprecedented afterward: the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket landed vertically on a platform floating in the Atlantic Ocean a few minutes after its job was finished. However, the rocket touched down too hard because it ran out of hydraulic fluid, and was damaged in the process:

Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 10, 2015

Didn't get good landing/impact video. Pitch dark and foggy. Will piece it together from telemetry and ... actual pieces.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 10, 2015

Normally, rockets are simply allowed to break up into pieces or sink in the ocean after each use. A controlled landing of the rocket could have allowed SpaceX to reuse it on a future flight — and reusing this multi-million dollar piece of equipment, rather than throwing it out after every flight, could dramatically drive down the cost of space travel.

The landing platform, which was damaged during the hard landing. (SpaceX)

But even if the rough landing destroyed the rocket, just placing it accurately on the platform was a big step in the right direction. The company admitted this was a difficult maneuver with a high chance of failure beforehand, and it's expected they'll keep trying in future launches.

What SpaceX was trying to do

The company launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in order to carry an uncrewed space capsule up to the International Space Station. The Dragon capsule will deliver all sorts of cargo to the ISS — food, life support equipment, and several scientific experiments — when it arrives there on Monday.

The rocket that launched the capsule into space is made up of two parts: a 138-foot-tall first stage, which burned for the first few minutes of flight, lifting the craft up to an altitude of about 50 miles before separating and falling back to Earth, and a smaller, 49-foot-tall second stage, which burned for another five minutes or so, carrying the spacecraft into orbit before disconnecting and falling back down to earth as well.

Usually, both of these stages — as well as the stages that make up other rockets in general — break up into pieces as they plummet downward, eventually sinking in the ocean and becoming unusable. But today, as the first stage fell back to earth, SpaceX fired its engines in order to stabilize and guide it for a controlled landing on an autonomous uncrewed barge, stationed about 200 miles east of Jacksonville, Florida, as shown in the graphic at right, from Space.com.

As the rocket descended, steerable fins affixed to its outside helped guide it and slow it down. As it neared the barge, a set of legs unfolded from the bottom of the rocket, and the rocket gently landing on them, fully upright at a speed of about 4.5 miles per hour.

The fins, affixed to the outside of the first stage. (SpaceX)

Apparently, it hit the platform with too much speed to survive the impact, due to a lack of hydraulic fluid used to slow it down. But just getting it to land on the platform after flight is a pretty big accomplishment.

It might seem simple, but no one had ever done anything like it before — and it was difficult for a few different reasons. For one, the rocket is designed to launch a spacecraft into orbit, which means that it's extremely tricky to decelerate and steer on the way down. SpaceX compared the feat to "trying to balance a rubber broomstick on your hand in the middle of a wind storm," and only gave it a 50 percent chance of succeeding beforehand.

Additionally, with its legs extended, the rocket is 70 feet wide, so landing it on the 300-foot wide floating platform required a high degree of accuracy. Finally, the platform itself was a moving target as it swayed slightly in the water.

SpaceX made similar attempts to land its rockets as part of three previous launches, and two times, it managed to get the rocket to slowly hover and land upright in the ocean, but then it fell over.

A video showing one of SpaceX's previous attempts to land the Falcon 9 at sea.

Why SpaceX wants to reuse a rocket

One of the factors that make space travel so expensive is the fact that most of the equipment used to put cargo or people in orbit is destroyed after each use. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has famously likened this to throwing away a brand-new 747 after a single flight to London.

From the beginning, his company has sought to make spaceflight possible with reusable components. And though that's an extremely ambitious goal, this landing was a first step towards achieving it.

The launch of SpaceX's previous cargo resupply mission, in September. (SpaceX)

If landed successfully, the first stage of the Falcon 9 could be refurbished and used for a future flight. The Dragon capsule it launches into orbit, meanwhile, is already reusable, and the company has plans to eventually try landing and reusing the second stage of future rocket designs in a similar way as well. If future attempts are successful, this could mean that the majority of the rocket components could be used several times.

While some experts say that the potential cost savings of reusing rockets is overstated, SpaceX has publicly said that building a new Falcon 9 rocket costs $54 million, but using it to put a payload into orbit uses only about $200,000 worth of fuel. There are certainly other costs associated with a launch, but the bottom line is that the company wouldn't be so obsessed with trying to reuse rockets if it wouldn't save them money.

And if it does, that could change the economics of spaceflight, opening up a number of new possibilities — perhaps including new collaborations with NASA and space tourism.

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Update: This post has been edited to reflect ongoing developments.

Interesting analysis from Creative Strategies’s Ben Bajarin, speculating that the smart watch market will likely break in one of two ways:

• Like MP3 players, where Apple dominates in market share.
• Like the phone market, where Apple owns the profitable high end of the market, but with a 20-or-so percent share of the total market.

Here’s the thing I keep thinking about. Watches and wearables are like Apple Pay, insofar as no third-party solution can compete with Apple for iPhone users. Apple Pay feels like magic because it’s built into iOS, with links to the NFC and Touch ID hardware. Third-party payment solutions can be (and have been) built apps for iOS, but no mere app can offer the experience Apple Pay does.

It’s the same with wearables. Apple Watch will have integration with the iPhone at the system level, not the app level. Other smart watches may succeed, but I doubt they will succeed with iPhone users. If you’re an iPhone user, and you want a “smart” wearable, you will buy an Apple Watch.

Conversely, I don’t think Apple Watch will ever have any appeal to non-iPhone users. This first year, Apple is explicit about it — you need an iPhone to use Apple Watch. So the question of whether the overall smart watch market winds up looking more like MP3 players or phones comes down to how many non-iPhone users will buy any smart watch at all.

(The third possibility I see: smart watches, Apple Watch included, never really become a big deal.)

Update: So is this an anti-trust risk for Apple? I think no, thanks to the advantage of not having even close to a majority market share in phones.

Now there's proof -- not being able to be near your iPhone or answer it because you're otherwise engaged causes a measurable increase in anxiety as well as decreased cognition. A study published yesterday in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communica...

The world is going to pieces and people like [Ansel] Adams and [Edward] Weston are photographing rocks! – Henri Cartier-Bresson

What better way to conjure up a longing for freedom than to evoke the name of that avuncular figure of American photography Ansel Adams. It’s a name synonymous with photography, with stunning landscapes that leave one with an unbounded sense of liberty. So why not use Ansel’s name to grace a bill that sets forth to “restore the first amendment rights of photographers?”

After all, “in recent years, the Federal Government has enacted regulations to prohibit or restrict photography in National Parks, public spaces, and of government buildings, law enforcement officers, and other government personnel carrying out their duties.”

And let’s not forget, “in recent years, photographers on Federal lands and spaces have been threatened with seizure and forfeiture of photographic equipment and memory cards, and have been arrested or threatened with arrest for merely recording what the eye can see from public spaces.”

These are serious concerns indeed and Republican U.S. Representative Steve Stockman from Texas seems to have a noble intent. House Bill H.R. 5893 (The Ansel Adams Act) seeks to make sure that “future ‘Ansel Adams’ must not have their paths blocked, regulated and made more expensive with fees and fines, or be threatened with arrest and seizure of their equipment.” And just how will the future law prevent such ignoble things from happening?

In General. It is contrary to the public policy of the United States to prohibit or restrict photography in public spaces, whether for private, news media, or commercial use.

Ok, I’m fine with that.

Prohibition on Fees, Permits, or Insurance. No Federal Government agency shall require fees, permits or insurance as a condition to take still or moving images on Federal lands, National Parks and Forests, and public spaces, whether for private, media, or commercial use.

I’m mostly ok with that, although I might take issue with getting rid of fees and the “insurance as a condition” when it comes to certain commercial shoots.

Prohibition on the Seizure and Forfeiture of Photographic Equipment. Federal law enforcement officers or private contractors shall not seize any photographic equipment or their contents or memory cards or film, and shall not order a photographer to erase the contents of a camera or memory card or film.

Ok, I really like that part!

Should a Federal agency seek to restrict photography of its installations or personnel, it shall obtain a court order that outlines the national security or other reasons for the restriction. Such court order shall allow restrictions of photography when such photography may lead to the endangerment of public safety or national security. Nothing in this Act shall restrict Federal agencies from taking lawful steps to ascertain whether or not photography may consist of reconnaissance for the purpose of endangerment of public safety or national security or for other unlawful activity.

Yup! I knew it! There’s always a catch!

Paragraph (B) of Section 3 of the Ansel Adams Act is, in my opinion, dubious to say the least, and for several reasons. First, it codifies a process by which federal agencies can officially restrict photography of any of its (The federal government’s) people, places, or things before anyone gets to pick up a camera. In doing so, you would have to challenge the court order after the fact and given that the process will be set forth in law, challenging the court order would be that much more difficult.

This differs from the current process of challenging any unconstitutional legislation preventing photographers from shooting publicly based on 1st amendment legal precedent, a process that has a long record of success. (just ask the ACLU). And don’t get me started on the part about the lack of restriction of federal agencies to ascertain whether or not photography may endanger public safety, be a risk to national security or be restricted “FOR OTHER UNLAWFUL ACTIVITY” (ambiguous much?!).

This basically gives federal agencies free rein to decide when, where, and why they can restrict public photography. And, because the Ansel Adams Act would be a federal law, it opens up the door for states to pass their own comparable legislation which would be applicable to state and local agencies.

But what do I know? I mean, I will admit to not being formally schooled in constitutional law, and though the bill’s other provisions are inarguably important, I can think of at least one situation where Paragraph (B) of Section 3 might have ugly consequences for not only photographers but for public access to information.

Police actions aren’t exactly fun, whether it be law enforcement overstepping its legal bounds in either a stop or arrest, or crowd control during a protest.

I was no more than four feet away from the officers you see above. At the time they were trying to disperse a crowd of protestors who had gathered to voice their frustrations over lack of indictment of police officers in both Ferguson and New York City. Before unleashing a barrage of tear gas and beanbag bullets, the police officially and monotonously made an announcement over a loudspeaker ordering the crowd to disperse or they (the police) would use force to do so.

Under a local version of the Ansel Adams Act and given the circumstances of the tense situation (several business had been vandalized earlier that evening), I don’t think it would be unreasonable to imagine an addendum to the announcement stating that by court order photography would be thereafter restricted. If that were the case, instead of having a series of images documenting what had gone on that night, I would either have nothing by way of me running off with my tail between my legs, or could potentially have been arrested, my camera confiscated, and any images taken that night destroyed.

And that would be the case for any other individual with a picture taking device.

Now granted, this may sound like a far fetched slippery slope. After all the bill hasn’t even come up for vote. Still, if there’s one thing Ansel Adams did know and try to teach, it’s that the devil is in the details, and I’d rather err on the side of caution when it comes to certain fundamental rights. Because it’s a lot easier to fight for them when they still exist than it is to fight to get them back.

If you’re not a fan of the language in Paragraph (3), here’s the complete list of House Representatives. Contact yours should you want to have that language changed. If you want more info regarding your rights to shoot in public in the United States, here’s an ACLU article about just that.

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About the author: Pete Rosos is a freelance photographer in the SF Bay Area. You can find his work and writing through his website and blog. This article originally appeared here.

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Image credits: Photographs by Pete Rosos

On April 1st, 1995, the Hubble Telescope captured a photograph that became one of the most iconic space photos ever captured. Titled, “Pillars of Creation,” the image shows the gigantic columns of interstellar gas and dust of the Eagle Nebula 6,000 light years away.

Now, 20 years after that image was created, scientists have recreated that image using the same space telescope (shown above).

Here’s what the original 1995 version looked like:

The new photograph at the top is actually a cropped version. Here’s the full one:

In addition to capturing a sharper and wider view of the scene, the scientists also decided to shoot an near-infrared photograph of the same nebula. Here’s that version:

This new view allows us to see through the gas and dust pillars since infrared light travels right through most of it. Only the densest regions show up as ghost-like structures.

You can read more about these photographs in this article on the NASA website. There are also downloadable versions of the new photo here (including a 114MB TIFF file).

(H/T Colossal)

Zwier Spanjer recently purchased a DJI Phantom 2 camera drone and captured the video above on his first day of flying it outdoors. The flight didn’t turn out the way Spanjer planned.

As the drone was flying over a field in a small town, its battery became depleted and the Phantom began a slow uncontrolled descent to the ground. Unfortunately for Spanjer, it wasn’t actually ground beneath the drone, but rather a small body of water.

Realizing that he was about to lose his new $580 piece of equipment to the water, Spanjer quickly hopped in, waded over, and caught the drone with one hand just as it was about to hit the water. The onboard camera captured dramatic footage of the whole thing.

The video has since gone viral on YouTube, where it has become a top 10 most popular video at the time of this post. People are even beginning to remix the footage into wonderful new creations:

If you’d like to avoid this type of thing happening to your drone in the future, one thing you can do is create some DIY water landing gear using pieces of styrofoam.

(via Laughing Squid)

Lunar Swimming

What if there was a lake on the Moon? What would it be like to swim in it? Presuming that it is sheltered in a regular atmosphere, in some giant dome or something.

Kim Holder

This would be so cool.

In fact, I honestly think it's cool enough that it gives us a pretty good reason to go to the Moon in the first place. At the very least, it's better than the one Kennedy gave.

Floating would feel about the same on the Moon as on Earth, since how high in the water you float depends only on your body's density compared to the water's, not the strength of gravity.

Swimming underwater would also feel pretty similar. The inertia of the water is the main source of drag when swimming, and inertia is a property of matter[1]♬ BILL NYE THE SCIENCE GUY ♬ independent of gravity. The top speed of a submerged swimmer would be about the same on the Moon as here—about 2 meters/second.

Everything else would be different and way cooler. The waves would be bigger, the splash fights more intense, and swimmers would be able to jump out of the water like dolphins.

This[2]Not this one. The other one.​[3]The simplest approach, which gives us an approximate answer, is to treat the swimmer as a simple projectile. The formula for the height of a projectile is:

\( \frac{\text{speed}^2}{2\times\text{gravity}} \)

... which tells us that a champion swimmer moving at 2 meters per second (4.5 mph) would only have enough kinetic energy to lift their body about 20 centimeters against gravity.

That's not totally accurate, although it's enough to tell us that dolphin jumps on Earth probably aren't in the cards for us. But to get a more accurate answer (and an equation we can apply to the Moon), we need to account for a few other things.

When a swimmer first breaks the surface, they don't have to lift their full weight; they're partially supported by buoyancy. As more of their body leaves the water, the force of buoyancy decreases, since their body is displacing less water. Since the force of gravity isn't changing, their net weight increases.

You can calculate how much potential energy is required to lift a body vertically through the surface to a certain height, but it's a complicated integral (you integrate the displacement of the submerged portion of their body over the vertical distance they travel) and depends on their body shape. For a human body moving fast enough to jump most of the way out of the water, this effect probably adds about half a torso-length to their final height—and less if they're not able to make it all the way out.

The other effect we have to account for is the fact that a swimmer can continue kicking as they start to leave the water. When a swimmer is submerged and moving at top speed, the drag from the water is equal to the thrust they generate by kicking and ... whatever the gerund form of the verb is for the things your arms do while swimming. My first thought was "stroking," but it's definitely not that.

Anyway, once the jumping swimmer breaks the surface, the drag almost vanishes, but they can keep kicking for a few moments. To figure out how much energy this adds, you can multiply the thrust from kicking by the distance over which they're kicking after breaking the surface, since energy equals force times distance. The distance is most of a body length, or 1 to 1.5 meters. As for the force from kicking, random Google results for a search for lifeguard qualifications suggest that good swimmers might be able to carry 10 lbs over their heads for a short distance, which means they're generating a little more than 10 pounds-force (50+ N) of kicking thrust.

We can combine all these together into a big ol' equation:

\[ \text{Jump height}=\left(\frac{\tfrac{1}{2}\times\text{body mass}\times\left(\text{top speed}\right)^2+\text{kick force}\times\text{torso length}}{\text{Earth gravity}\times\text{body mass}}\right)+\left(\text{buoyancy correction} \right) \] footnote contains some detail on the math behind a dolphin jump. Calculating the height a swimmer can jump out of the water requires taking several different things into account, but the bottom line is that a normal swimmer on the Moon could probably launch themselves a full meter out of the water, and Michael Phelps may well be able to manage 2 or 3.

The numbers get even more exciting when we introduce fins.

Swimmers wearing fins can go substantially faster than regular swimmers without them (although the fastest swimmer wearing flippers will still lose to a runner, even if the runner is also wearing flippers and jumping over hurdles).

Champion finswimmers can go almost 3.2 m/s wearing a monofin, which is fast enough for some pretty impressive jumps—even on Earth. Data on swimfin top speeds and thrusts[4]This paper provides some sample data. suggest that on the Moon, a champion finswimmer could probably launch themselves as high as 4 or 5 meters into the air. In other words, on the Moon, you could conceivably do a high dive in reverse.

But it gets even better. A 2012 paper in PLoS ONE, titled Humans Running in Place on Water at Simulated Reduced Gravity, concluded that while humans can't run on the surface of water on Earth,[5]They actually provide a citation for this statement, which is delightful. they might just barely be able to do so on the Moon. (I highly recommend reading their paper, if only for the hilarious experimental setup illustration on page 2.)

Because of the reduced gravity on the Moon, the water would be launched upward more easily, just like the swimmers. The result would be larger waves and more flying droplets. In technical terms, a pool on the Moon would be more "splashy".[6]The SI unit of splashiness is the splashypant.

To avoid splashing all the water out, you'd want to design the deck so water drains quickly back into the pool. You could just make the rim higher, but then you'd spoil one of the key joys of a pool on the Moon—exiting via Slip 'N Slide:

I 100% support this idea. If we ever build a Moon base, I think we should absolutely build a big swimming pool there. Sure, sending a swimming pool's worth of water (135 horses) to the Moon's surface would be expensive.[7]If you decided to bundle a backyard pool into individual two-liter bottles, and sent them in 3,000 batches of 10 each via the startup Astrobotic, it would cost you $72 billion (according to their website's calculator). But on the other hand, this lunar base is going to have people on it, so you need to send some water anyway.[8]Sending a supply of water and a filter system is probably cheaper than sending a replacement astronaut every 3 or 4 days, although I encourage NASA to run the numbers on that to be sure.

And it's really not impossible. A large backyard swimming pool weighs about as much as four Apollo lunar landers. A next-generation[9](or, heck, previous-generation) heavy-lift rocket, like Boeing's NASA SLS or Elon Musk's SpaceX Falcon Heavy, would be able to deliver a good-sized pool to the Moon in not too many trips.

So maybe the next step, if you really want a swimming pool on the Moon, is to call Elon Musk and ask for a quote.

Windows: We've all done it: in the middle of writing you get a notification that looks a lot more interesting, then another, and another. Suddenly, you're distracted and procrastinating. FORCEdraft is a writing tool that stays open and blocks everything else on your computer until you hit the writing goal you set in the beginning.

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There is a story that Charles Ornstein and Ryann Grochowski Jones published Wednesday at ProPublica and the Upshot that should make you furious.

The story is a deep dive into data about what pharmaceutical companies spend on marketing their new products. What it shows is that drug makers devote the largest share of their spending doctor interactions (things like meals and visits) trying to sell doctors on prescribing "me-too" drugs: pills that essentially do the same thing as another drug already on the market.

Big breakthrough drugs that substantially improve how doctors practice medicine don't get many marketing dollars. Build a pill that cures Hepatitis C in nearly all patients (as Gilead did earlier this year), and doctors will easily buy it.

Drugs that don't offer a big improvement, however, are an understandably tougher sell. So the pharmaceutical companies spending the most to promote their more mediocre products.

'"They may have some unique niche in the market, but they are fairly redundant with other therapies that are already available," said Dr. Joseph Ross, an associate professor of medicine and public health at Yale University School of Medicine. "Many of these, you could call me-too drugs."

In almost all cases, older, cheaper products are available to treat the same conditions. Companies typically try to differentiate the new drugs by claiming they are easier to use; carry fewer side effects; work faster than competitors; or have medical advantages.

It makes sense that the drugs that aren't that great take the most wooing and winning over of doctors to get them on board as prescribers. There's a blood thinner that Ornstein and Jones write about called Brilinta, which drug company AstraZeneca spent $7.7 million talking to doctors and hospitals about during the last five months of 2013 (the time period of the ProPublica investigation). That puts it in third place for marketing dollars.

Brilinta is pretty similar to Plavix, a much less expensive, generic blood thinner that does largely similar things. Of course, Brilinta needs a marketing budget; it's up against a cheaper product that treats the same type of issues.

Pharmaceutical companies offered ProPublica defenses about why they needed to educate doctors, and it is possible that these "me too" drugs work better for certain classes of patients. But generally, they're not especially innovative products and ultimately just drive up health-care spending.

There's nothing like a fresh start and a whole new world to explore.

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What would you do if you came across a fat stack of cash while doing urban exploration photography? That’s what happened to Dave of Freaktography last year.

On one afternoon in January 2014, Dave got off work early and decided to pay a visit to a badly decaying abandoned house that he had heard about from a friend. The “house was special from the many antiques and artifacts found throughout,” he says.

Here are some photos showing what he saw when he arrived. There were old possessions scattered in many of the rooms:

After exploring the house, Dave went back down to the kitchen. As he was about to shoot the following shot, he noticed something by the corner of a mattress.

Looking closer, he found a yellow home hardware bag that was filled with rolls of cash. Upon taking the rolls out and counting through it, Dave found that it was a stash of nearly $7,000 in old US and Canadian currency:

Many of the bundles had papers with amounts and dates from the 1960s and 1970s.

Dave operates by the well known urban exploration principle, “take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints.” He and his friend decided to try and find the rightful owner of the money. After doing some research into the property’s owner, they found a number to call.

The woman who picked up the phone turned out to be the granddaughter of the home’s previous inhabitants. Dave writes,

We gave her the money, every penny (my friend made sure she knew, not a dollar had been held back), she started to cry – overwhelmed by this random act of kindness, and by the emotions she feels being back at this house. We didn’t pry or ask about family history, we offered a few hugs and just took in the moment. We posed with her for a photo, at her request, and after many many “Thank You” hugs we went on our way.

They later learned that the money was likely collected over decades by the woman’s grandparents from a fruit stand they owned.

Dave has since posted his entire set of photos from the house on Facebook along with the story of his find. The album is titled, “House of Treasures.” You can find more of Dave’s urban exploration photography on his website.

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Image credits: Photographs by Dave/Freaktography and used with permission

On June 30th at precisely 23:59:59, the world’s atomic clocks will pause for a single second. Or, to be more precise, they’ll change to the uncharted time of 23:59:60 — before ticking over to the more worldly hour of 00:00:00 on the morning of July 1st, 2015. This addition of a leap second, announced by the Paris Observatory this week, is being added to keep terrestrial clocks in step with the vagaries of astronomical time — in this case, the slowing of the Earth’s rotation. And it's a bit of a headache for computer engineers.

What causes leap seconds? Earthquakes, tidal drag, the weather

Leap seconds are like the Y2K bug in that they threaten to throw out of sync time as measured by computers and time as measured by atomic clocks. But...

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As enumerated earlier, I have numerous questions regarding Mark Gurman’s report that the upcoming next-generation MacBook Air does away with all ports other than two: a USB Type-C and a headphone jack.

But one that I keep thinking about is MagSafe. I can definitely see getting rid of classic USB — it’s old and thick. Thunderbolt, sort of. But MagSafe? When Apple announced MagSafe back in 2006, I knew they were solving a real problem, not an imaginary marketing problem. Tripping over power cables and yanking laptops off tables and onto floors was a real issue. I had an iBook way back when that ultimately died after one such incident too many. If anything, Apple has made MagSafe 2 even easier to pull apart, not harder. Switching to USB Type-C seems like it would take us all the way back to days when tripping over the charging cable would take your laptop along for the ride.

Want to take a cruise this year? Pick the best destination for the month you want to travel with this list from Travel+Leisure. They cover many of the popular cruise locations. Most of these recommendations are based on a combination of busy season, favorable weather conditions, and accessibility due to time of year.

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Here’s an interesting look at the magic that goes into making movies look the way they do. The video above shows how scenes in one particular movie looked straight out of the camera compared to the finished version after color grading. It’s like the video equivalent of the before-and-after post-processing examples photographers often share on the Web.

The footage was shot using a Sony F55 at 4K in LOG and was then color graded by Taylre Jones of the Kansas City-based Grade. Here’s Jones’ explanation of what LOG format is (in layman’s terms):

The image is shot in a LOG format on an F55. In simple terms, this captures the image to maintain details. As stated, this allows me to be able to stretch the image in more creative directions.

You might compare it to winding a flexible 100ft extension cord up into a small circle. If the film only calls for needing 65ft to tell the story I have the ability to manipulate the cord and pull it out to 65ft. When cameras don’t shoot in their LOG or flat modes it is sort of like taking the flexibility out of the cord. It’s pretty much stuck at being 100ft long.

Jones also says that each of the shots you see above took around 10-15 separate adjustments. They were grouped into 1-4 sweeps for the sake of brevity.

Here are a couple screenshots of the before-and-after comparisons seen in the video:

In case you’re wondering, the movie is an independent feature film called “The House on Pine Street.”

(via Reddit)

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P.S. If you’d like to see more of the finished product, check out this teaser trailer for the film:

In a set of artist renditions, 9to5Mac offers a look at Apple's long-rumored 12-inch Retina MacBook Air. The renditions and details shared in the report are consistent with previous reports on the machine, although plans do sometimes change during the development process.


As previously described in rumors, the next MacBook Air will have roughly the same footprint as the current 11-inch model, but include a 12-inch display nestled inside narrower bezels. The machine's keyboard will also extend from edge to edge while the speakers move to a set of grilles above the keyboard.

Comparison of 12-inch Retina MacBook Air (left) with current 11-inch MacBook Air (right)
As part of Apple's effort to reduce the thickness of the MacBook Air, the new 12-inch model will do away with nearly all of the ports currently found on the machine, including the usual USB and MagSafe ports. Instead, the machine's sides will include only a headphone jack, a pair of microphones, and a USB Type-C port that appears set to handle both connectivity and charging.

Apple's new Retina MacBook Air is expected to run on new Broadwell Core M to allow for the thin, fanless design and perhaps come in multiple color options similar to the company's iPhone and iPad lineups. The machine has been rumored to be entering production as soon as this month, although it is unclear whether Apple may wait until its Worldwide Developers Conference in June to launch the device or introduce it earlier in the year.

Connecting to the web on a flight this Friday, Google engineer Adrienne Porter Felt noticed something weird. When she logged in, there was a red X over the padlock by the URL bar, a sign that something was fishy. She was looking at the Google search page, supposedly protected by HTTPS, but the site wasn't what it seemed.

A successful HTTPS connection to google.com usually means you can be sure all the data had come from Google and no one had messed with it in transit. There's even a signed certificate to prove it — but that red X meant the certificate didn't check out, and when she looked closer, Felt realized why. The certificate wasn't signed by Google. It was signed by Gogo, the inflight Wi-Fi provider, which was pretending to be...

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Excellent news for anyone "working" from home on today's snow day. The Internet Archive has brought online free, browser-playable versions of classic MS-DOS games.

The Oregon Trail is an obvious candidate for whiling your day away.

Definitely not my first time

I'm also a big fan of Koei's war simulation games like L'Empereur and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. And who can forget Kings Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella or the original Sim City?

(via Abby Olheiser)

Internet TV is here. Sony kicked us off in earnest with the launch of PlayStation Vue (which currently remains in limited beta), but Dish is about to make a full-on push into a new TV experience aimed at cord cutters and millennials who've dropped or never even had a cable or satellite subscription. If you're someone who pays for Netflix (and maybe Hulu Plus) and borrows someone else's password to watch HBO Go, you're probably the type of person Dish is trying to sell this on. At a recent media event, CEO Joe Clayton recently said his company is aiming for the 18-35 demographic. "I believe it's the launch of a whole new industry," he said.

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One of the quickest ways to feel like an entertainment insider is to analyze the weekly box office. Each Sunday night, we're bombarded with news about which movie made the most money over the weekend and whether or not any upcoming movies can unseat America's top film.

But not everyone knows what all these numbers mean. An indie movie that opens to $10 million is usually doing really well, while a blockbuster's $10 million opening would mean instant death. What ultimately matters is how much a movie makes in profit.

Randal Olson, a fourth-year computer science graduate research assistant at Michigan State, culled data from Box Office Mojo and put those profit ratios into some handy charts. He looked at the most profitable movies since 1982:

(Randal Olson)

It's staggering to see just how much Paranormal Activity made (versus the cost to make it), and it also explains why movies in that franchise keep getting produced.

He also found the movies that studios took the biggest net losses on:

(Randal Olson)

Olson also calculated which movies had the highest loss ratio, giving us a better look at lower profile stinkers:

(Randal Olson)

A thing to keep in mind is that these profits are calculated based on a movie's original budget — they don't take into account the money spent on marketing and promotion that go into these films. Olsen explains that he "divided the profits by half to account for movie theaters keeping a share of the ticket sales, taxes, etc.".

The numbers are also based on US box office numbers, meaning a movie that does well overseas and breaks even could still look like a stinker on these charts.

Olson has more charts over on his site.