Andrew

Client: My fiancé and I are unhappy with the engagement photos you sent us.

Me: What’s wrong with them?

Client: We’re wearing sweat pants in them!

Me: But that’s what you wore to the shoot. I asked you on the day if you wanted to change into something more appropriate and you said no.

Client: Well, I didn’t know you were going to leave them in the actual photos. You’re a professional photographer - you’re supposed to Photoshop better clothing onto us or whatever.

Me: That’s not really what I do, nor is it really how Photoshop works…

Client: Don’t lie to me! I’ve seen what Photoshop can do in magazines and stuff like that. It’s not my fault you don’t know how to do your job properly!

After a summer of success, Marvel comics made a huge mistake this week.  The recently revealed variant cover for Spider-Woman #1, pictured a woman crouched on the edge of a building in a seductive position. The artist, Milo Manara, chose to portray Spider-Woman as erotic and sexy instead of as a strong, beloved member of the Avengers universe.

Here is what it would look like if Spider-Woman tried to jump from the position Manara rendered:

Spider-Woman tries to jump (Karine Charlebois)

But even the main cover for the issue, drawn by Greg Land, featured its share of problems. In addition to the obviously problematic sexualization of a female superhero, the drawings of Spider-Woman aren't even anatomically correct. Instead of rendering the female body as it appears in the world, the artist enhanced and skewed the proportions to fit a male fantasy of how a woman should be portrayed.

Artist Karine Charlebois, who runs the Tumblr Less Tits N' Ass, More Kickin' Ass, re-rendered the drawing to be anatomically correct and, in doing so, showed just how manipulated the Spider-Woman figure really is.

Spider-Woman leaps incorrectly because of anatomical deficiencies (Karine Charlebois)

Land's cover, Charlebois critiques, is also anatomically problematic even if it is less promiscuous than Manara's variant cover. "Artistic anatomy is all about drawing structure, from the inside out. Your muscles by themselves can't look right if they aren't placed on top of a properly proportioned skeleton," Charlebois wrote on her Tumblr. "It shows that Land is drawing by guessed shapes, copied contours, and practiced repeated motions. There's no real structure underneath his shapes."

Ultimately, this demolishes the critique that either of these Spider-Woman images are rendered in a way that Spider Man would also be drawn. Spider Man may also crouch before he launches into the air, but he certainly doesn't have his back lengthened, butt enlarged, and limbs skewed out of proportion to meet male expectations of beauty. Both covers have rendered Spider-Woman's body to meet male expectations, instead of to show her strength and power.

The Mary Sue has published all of Charlebois's anatomically correct images in a gallery.

DeviceGuru writes Eltechs announced a virtual machine that runs 32-bit x86 Linux applications on ARMv7 hardware. The ExaGear VM implements a virtual x86 Linux container on ARMv7 computers and is claimed to be 4.5 times faster than QEMU, according to Eltechs. The VM is based on binary translation technology and requires ARMv7, which means it should run on mini-PCs and SBCs based on Cortex-A8, A7, A9, and A15 processors — but sadly, it won't run on the ARM11 (ARMv6) SoC found on the Raspberry Pi. It also does not support applications that require kernel modules. It currently requires Ubuntu (v12.04 or higher), but will soon support another, unnamed Linux distro, according to Eltechs, which is now accepting half price pre-orders without payment obligation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Online advertising is annoying but the Internet wouldn't be nearly as great without it. Fast Company directs our attention to a study from U.K. video ad platform Ebuzzing that claims it would cost each of us around $232 extra per year to get all of the stuff on the web we now enjoy for free if we eliminated online ads.

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There are some good reasons to be critical of the ice bucket challenge, which has seen over a million people dump a bucket of water on their head to promote awareness and funding for ALS research.

Arguing that it's a waste of water, however, isn't one of them.

I've seen a few different people criticize the trend for wasting perfectly good, clean water. That may be true, but when you look at the amount of water wasted in the context of the staggeringly huge amounts of water we use to produce food — especially animal products — the ice bucket challenge is truly a drop in the bucket (sorry).

These numbers are based off an excellent chart on water use made by Eric Holthaus at Slate, and the assumption that the average bucket of ice and water contains five gallons. But even if the bucket contained 50, it'd still waste less water than is used to produce a single egg — and about a thirtieth as much as is used to produce a pound of beef.

The reason that animal products require so much water is that you have to take into account all the water used to grow the crops to feed the animals. For an average cow raised in an American feedlot, it takes somewhere between 5.3 and 7 pounds of corn to produce a single pound of beef.

Even if every American did the ice bucket challenge, we wouldn't drain our groundwater supplies. It's our agricultural methods and eating habits (and, perhaps, global warming) that are already causing our wells to run dry.

Do you keep your butter in the refrigerator? You do? Stop it. Stop it right this second. You're ruining your butter experience and making your toast taste like failure. Let me tell you why.

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Is the AI apocalypse near? Movies like the Terminator franchise and the Matrix have long portrayed dystopian futures where computers develop superhuman intelligence and destroy the human race — and there are also thinkers who think this kind of scenario is a real danger.

We interviewed one of them, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, last year. Others include singularity theorist Ray Kurzweil and Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.

But these thinkers overestimate the likelihood that we'll have computers as smart as human beings and exaggerate the danger that such computers would pose to the human race. In reality, the development of intelligent machines is likely to be a slow and gradual process, and computers with superhuman intelligence, if they ever exist, will need us at least as much as we need them. Here's why.

1) Genuine intelligence requires a lot of practical experience

(Matt)

Bostrom, Kurzweil, and other theorists of super-human intelligence have seemingly infinite faith in the power of raw computational power to solve almost any intellectual problem. Yet in many cases, a shortage of intellectual horsepower isn't the real problem.

To see why, imagine taking a brilliant English speaker who has never spoken a word of Chinese, locking her in a room with an enormous stack of books about the Chinese language, and asking her to become fluent in speaking Chinese. No matter how smart she is, how long she studies, and how many textbooks she has, she's not going to be able to learn enough to pass herself off as a native Chinese speaker.

That's because an essential part of becoming fluent in a language is interacting with other fluent speakers. Talking to natives is the only way to learn local slang, discover subtle shades in the meanings of words, and learn about social conventions and popular conversation topics. In principle, all of these things could be written down in a textbook, but in practice most of them aren't — in part because they vary so much from place to place and over time.

A machine trying to develop human-level intelligence faces a much more severe version of this same problem. A computer program has never grown up in a human family, fallen in love, been cold, hungry or tired, and so forth. In short, they lack a huge amount of the context that allows human beings to relate naturally to one another.

And a similar point applies to lots of other problems intelligent machines might tackle, from drilling an oil well to helping people with their taxes. Most of the information you need to solve hard problems isn't written down anywhere, so no amount of theoretical reasoning or number crunching, on its own, will get you to the right answers. The only way to become an expert is by trying things and seeing if they work.

And this is an inherently difficult thing to automate, since it requires conducting experiments and waiting to see how the world responds. Which means that scenarios where computers rapidly outpace human beings in knowledge and capabilities doesn't make sense — smart computers would have to do the same kind of slow, methodical experiments people do.

2) Machines are extremely dependent on humans

Machines need humans to help maintain complex machinery like oil rigs. (Marianne Muegenburg Cothern)

In the Terminator series, a military AI called Skynet becomes self-aware and begins using military hardware to attack humans.

This kind of scenario drastically underestimates how much machines depend on human beings to keep them working. A modern economy consists of millions of different kinds of machines that perform a variety of specialized functions. While a growing number of these machines are automated to some extent, virtually all of them depend on humans to supply power and raw materials, repair them when they break, manufacture more when they wear out, and so forth.

You might imagine humanity creating still more robots being created to perform these maintenance functions. But we're nowhere close to having this kind of general-purpose robot.

Indeed, building such a robot might be impossible due to a problem of infinite regress: robots capable of building, fixing, and supplying all the machines in the world would themselves be fantastically complex. Still more robots would be needed to service them. Evolution solved this problem by starting with the cell, a relatively simple, self-replicating building block for all life. Today's robots don't have anything like that and (despite the dreams of some futurists) are unlikely to any time soon.

This means that, barring major breakthroughs in robotics or nanotechnology, machines are going to depend on humans for supplies, repairs, and other maintenance. A smart computer that wiped out the human race would be committing suicide.

3) The human brain might be really difficult to emulate

(Brad Aaron)

Bostrom argues that if nothing else, scientists will be able to produce at least human-level intelligence by emulating the human brain, an idea that Hanson has also promoted. But that's a lot harder than it sounds.

Digital computers are capable of emulating the behavior of other digital computers because computers function in a precisely-defined, deterministic way. To simulate a computer, you just have to carry out the sequence of instructions that the computer being modeled would perform.

The human brain isn't like this at all. Neurons are complex analog systems whose behavior can't be modeled precisely the way digital circuits can. And even a slight imprecision in the way individual neurons are modeled can lead to a wildly inaccurate model for the brain as a whole.

A good analogy here is weather simulation. Physicists have an excellent understanding of the behavior of individual air molecules. So you might think we could build a model of the earth's atmosphere that predicts the weather far into the future. But so far, weather simulation has proven to be a computationally intractable problem. Small errors in early steps of the simulation snowball into large errors in later steps. Despite huge increases in computing power over the last couple of decades, we've only made modest progress in being able to predict future weather patterns.

Simulating a brain precisely enough to produce intelligence is a much harder problem than simulating a planet's weather patterns. There's no reason to think scientists will be able to do it in the foreseeable future.

4) To get power, relationships are more important than intelligence

(White House)

Bostrom suggests that intelligent machines could "become extremely powerful to the point of being able to shape the future according to its preferences." But if we think about how human societies work, it's obvious that intelligence by itself isn't sufficient to become powerful.

If it were, societies would be run by their scientists, philosophers, or chess prodigies. Instead, America — like most societies around the world — is run by men like Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. These men became powerful not because they were unusually bright, but because they were well-connected, charismatic, and knew how to offer the right combination of carrots and sticks to get others to do their bidding.

It's true that brilliant scientists have played an important role in creating powerful technologies such as the atomic bomb. And it's conceivable that a super intelligent computer would conceive of similar breakthroughs. But building new technologies and putting them into practice usually requires a lot of cash and manpower, which only powerful institutions like governments and large corporations can muster. The scientists who designed the atomic bomb needed Franklin Roosevelt to fund it.

The same point applies to intelligent computers. Any plausible plan for taking over the world would require the cooperation of thousands of people. There's no reason to think a computer would be any more effective at enlisting their assistance for an evil plot than a human scientist would be. Indeed, given that persuasion often depends on long-standing friendships, in-group loyalties, and charisma, a disembodied, friendless computer program would be at a huge disadvantage.

A similar point applies to the "singularly," Ray Kurzweil's idea that computers will someday become so intelligent that humans will no longer even be able to understand what they're doing. The most powerful ideas aren't ones that only their inventor can understand. Rather, powerful ideas are ones that can be widely understood and adopted by many people, multiplying their effect on the world. That will be as true of computer-generated ideas as it is of ideas generated by people. To change the world, a super-intelligent computer would need to bring the human race along with it.

5) The more intelligence there is in the world, the less valuable it will become

You might expect that computers will use their superior intelligence to become fabulously wealthy and then use their vast wealth to bribe humans into doing their bidding. But this ignores an important economic principle: as a resource grows more abundant, its value falls.

Sixty years ago, it cost millions of dollars to buy a computer that could do less than a modern smartphone. Today's computers can do vastly more than earlier generations, but the value of computing power has fallen even faster than computers' capabilities have improved.

So the first super-intelligent computer might be able to earn a lot of money, but its advantage will be fleeting. As computer chips continue getting cheaper and more powerful, people will build more and more super-intelligent computers. The unique capabilities of super-intelligent computers, whatever those turn out to be, will become commodities.

In a world of abundant intelligence, the most valuable resources will be those that are naturally limited, like land, energy, and minerals. Since those resources are controlled by human beings, we'll have at least as much leverage over intelligent computers as they'll have over us.

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You've probably been wondering this for years: how in the world could the characters of Friends afford their luxurious New York apartments?

And it's not like Friends is alone in giving its characters real estate that seems to be beyond their financial means. And those prices would only be higher in the New York City real estate market of 2014. Here's an infographic for anyone who's lost countless hours of sleep trying to crunch how large those sitcom rent and mortgage checks would be.

Chris Kolmar over at movoto.com calculated the financial situations of characters from 15 old sitcoms, so he could determine whether or not they could actually afford to live in the same places they lived in their old shows in the year 2014.

Sitcom Cribs. (Movoto.com)

I'm not sure if there are computers in these boxes, but if so, that's a dangerous game. Still, it's probably worth it for the sense of accomplishment you'd feel after pulling something like this off, right? [Photo credit: Imgur]...

Right this minute, Aquarius and Robert the Bruce, two fish, are battling to the death in an epic game of Street Fighter II Turbo. You see, the two fish live in a fish tank wired up to a camera that tracks their movements and doles out the appropriate commands to the video game. It's like FishPlaysPokemon, but more hardcore. I never thought I'd see one fish KO another fish using the "throw" move. But now I...

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The first eight seasons of The Simpsons are arguably the greatest achievement in television history. Fast-paced, erudite, and packed with great jokes alongside a surprising amount of heart, the series threw a century of American pop culture into a blender and hit puree. (It then ran for another 17 years, which have many good-to-great moments in them but don't have the stunning consistency of the early years. Still, eight years is a phenomenally long streak for any TV series.)

The run of that show is now approaching 600 episodes, with a movie as well. And that's far more time than you likely have to spend watching a TV show, even with all episodes available on the Simpsons World app, or running near-daily on cable channel FXX.

Instead, let's pick one hour a piece — two consecutive episodes — from those first eight seasons, just to see how the show grew, changed, and became the pop culture behemoth it is today.

Season one

"The Crepes of Wrath" and "Krusty Gets Busted" (episodes 11 and 12): The first season of Simpsons is a little off from what the show would become. It's still packed with great stuff, and it's easy to see why the show was such an atomic bomb on the TV landscape. But it's also a little slower-paced and tentative. You can feel the series figuring out just what it can do. These two episodes are a reminder of that time. The first, involving Bart going to France on a foreign-exchange program, is a reminder that when the show debuted in the 1989-90 TV season, the Cold War wasn't technically over yet, while the second features the first appearance of recurring psychopath Sideshow Bob.

Lisa's Substitute (20th Century Fox)

Season two

"Brush with Greatness" and "Lisa's Substitute" (episodes 18 and 19): Here's where the show really starts to become The Simpsons that we know and love. "Brush with Greatness" isn't the best episode ever, but it features some great moments between Marge and Mr. Burns, a character pairing the show got surprising mileage out of, as well as a killer ending. But, really, you're watching this hour for "Lisa's Substitute," one of those episodes that stands out as the show doing everything it was capable of, along with perhaps the most moving single line in the entire series.

Season three

"Flaming Moe's" and "Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk" (episodes 10 and 11; airing from 8-9 a.m. Eastern Friday: Even casual fans will recall "Flaming Moe's," which manages to work as a pastiche of Cocktail, an extended homage to Cheers, and an exploration of Homer's relationship with Moe. Aerosmith's appearance, along with "Homer at Bat" later in the season, began the show's long tradition of celebrity cameos, and the episode features the best-ever Bart prank call to Moe's, wherein a gentleman named Hugh Jass politely answers. But the real winner here is "Kraftwerk," one of the first episodes to veer into outright fantasy and absurdism, featuring a way longer than necessary sequence in which Homer explores the "Land of Chocolate."

Season four

"Duffless" and "Last Exit to Springfield" (episodes 16 and 17): The Simpsons' fourth season is one of the best, most consistent seasons in television history. (One of the others? The series' fifth season.) The lineup of episodes is filled with heavy hitters, but this pair exemplifies how the show got better as it became more about Homer and less about his son. In the first half-hour, Homer tries to give up beer, which goes about as you'd expect. And in the second half-hour, Homer leads his fellow nuclear power plant workers in a strike because "Lisa needs braces." (If your brain didn't immediately fill in "dental plan," you absolutely need to watch this half-hour of television.) "Last Exit" is a handful of episodes with a good argument for being the best the show ever did, so it's worth it to check it out.

"Cape Feare" (20th Century Fox)

Season five

"Cape Feare" and "Homer Goes to College" (episodes 2 and 3): "Homer Goes to College," the final episode of the show written by Conan O'Brien, is excellent, but it'd be criminal to not list "Cape Feare" here. Its reputation as one of the show's finest episodes is completely deserved, not least because of how fearlessly bizarre it lets itself get. Not one but two Gilbert & Sullivan songs are sung — the first without any context given at all. Sideshow Bob's parole hearing ends with a member of the board pronouncing, "No one who speaks German could be an evil man." And most importantly of all, there's the rake sequence, one of the strangest and most wonderful bits the show ever pulled off.

Season six

"Homer the Great" and "And Maggie Makes Three" (episodes 12 and 13): As the series wound its way into the second half of its run of great seasons, The Simpsons alternated brilliantly between whimsy and pathos. This hour perfectly shows off both qualities. In the first episode, Homer discovers he is unexpectedly the chosen one of a secret society known as the Stonecutters, a group that sings one of the series' best songs. And in the second half-hour, the show flashes back to the birth of baby Maggie, in an episode that courts legitimate despair before a perfect, bittersweet ending. If you watch only one hour of the show this weekend, make it this one.

"King-Size Homer" (20th Century Fox)

Season seven

"King-Size Homer" and "Mother Simpson" (episodes 7 and 8): Here's another duo that alternates between a whimsical episode (in which Homer decides to get as fat as possible to qualify for workplace disability benefits, because he is as lazy and venal as TV characters come) and a more heartwarming one (in which Homer's long-lost mother returns and old wounds are reopened). The ending of "Mother Simpson," in particular, features one of the show's most unexpectedly lovely images and speaks to how well the series was directed and animated at its height. These weren't just minimally animated still images; they were real, beautifully detailed cartoons.

Season eight

"A Milhouse Divided" and "Lisa's Date with Density" (episodes 6 and 7): Let us now praise Milhouse "Nobody Likes Milhouse" van Houten. Few secondary characters have the pathos to sustain back-to-back character studies like this. The first, about his parents' split, could easily turn dour and After School Special-y on a lesser show, but the writer, Steve Tompkins, manages to neither make the stakes feel trivial nor let the gravity of the situation detract from the jokes. The episode's finest moment — "I sleep in a racing car, do you?" "I sleep in a big bed with my wife" — is simultaneously hilarious and absolutely devastating. "Lisa's Date with Density" is ostensibly about her attempts to civilize Nelson Muntz, who manages to gain complexity without giving up the things that make him a great caricature, but Milhouse's desperate attempts for Lisa's approval form the episode's backdrop. It's not an accident that it ends with our blue-haired hero jumping into the air in glee upon Lisa's pronouncement that her next crush "could be anyone." There's nothing more Milhouse than passionately celebrating the smallest morsel of even potentially good news.

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Earlier this summer, Marvel could do no wrong. In the span of a week, the company announced that it was turning Thor, one of its iconic heroes, into a woman and that it would be turning Captain America into a black man. These moves were signals that the company wanted to reflect the non-white and female readers who read its books and give non-white and female characters the spotlight usually enjoyed by straight white men.

This week, the company appears to have made a misstep. In an exclusive to Comic Book Resources, Marvel revealed one of the covers to Spider-Woman #1 — a solo series featuring one of the strongest, most loved women in the Avengers universe.  And, well, this is not what readers were expecting from a company that has made the effort to show that it's being thoughtful about its female readership and female characters:

Spider-Woman #1 (Marvel)

To be clear, that is not how Spider-Man poses or is drawn when he climbs buildings:

The cover was drawn by Milo Manara, a comic book artist who is known for his erotic takes. Manara's Spider-Woman cover is a variant — a special cover commissioned for the series — and resembles his work in a comic called Click! Another cover (the one which most people will see in stores when the comic drops in November), by regular series artist Greg Land, was also issued:

Spider-Woman #1 by Greg Land (Marvel)

New submitter GammaKitsune writes: "The Player's Handbook for the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, formerly known as "D&D Next," released today to major bookstores and online retailers across the U.S. The Player's Handbook, which contains core rules for gameplay and character creation, is one of thee core rulebooks that developer Wizards of the Coast plans to release in 2014. The Monster Manual is scheduled to release in late September, and the Dungeon Master's Guide will release in mid November. Also out today is the first of two adventure modules in which players team up to battle against the dragon goddess Tiamat. Fifth edition has a lot to prove following the highly-controversial fourth edition, the rise of competing roleplaying game Pathfinder, and two years of public playtesting. Initial reviews posted on Amazon appear overwhelmingly positive at the time of writing, but more skeptical gamers may wish to take a look at the free "Basic Rules" posted on the official D&D website. The basic rules contain all the bare essentials needed to create a character or run your own adventure, and will serve both as a free introduction for new players and as a holdover for long time players until the remaining two rulebooks are released.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Above you'll see a picture of Scott Olson, the Getty photographer who's brought us many of the most striking images of protests and police crackdown that followed the shooting of Michael Brown.

The other two men in the photograph, despite presumably being police officers, are not identifiable at this time. Unlike normal police officers, they are not wearing name tags or badges with visible numbers on them. When police arrested the Washington Post's Wesley Lowery and the Huffington Post's Ryan Reilly, they weren't wearing badges or nametags either. Reasonable people can disagree about when, exactly, it's appropriate for cops to fire tear gas into crowds. But there's really no room for disagreement about when it's reasonable for officers of the law to take off their badges and start policing anonymously.

many cops operating in Ferguson are betting on impunity, and it seems to be a winning bet

There's only one reason to do this: to evade accountability for your actions.

Olson was released shortly after his arrest, as were Reilly and Lowery before him. Ryan Devereaux from The Intercept and Lukas Hermsmeier from the German tabloid Bild were likewise arrested last night and released without charges after an overnight stay in jail. In other words, they never should have been arrested in the first place. But nothing's being done to punish the mystery officers who did the arresting.

And what's particularly shocking about this form of evasion is how shallow it is. I can't identify the officers in that photograph. But the faces are clearly visible. The brass at the Ferguson Police Department, Saint Louis County Police Department, and Missouri Highway Patrol should be able to easily identify the two officers who are out improperly arrested photographers. By the same token, video taken at the Lowery and Reilly arrests should allow for the same to be done in that case.

Policing without a nametag can help you avoid accountability from the press or from citizens, but it can't possibly help you avoid accountability from the bosses.

on another level, it would almost be nicer to hear that nobody in charge thinks there's been any misconduct

For that you have to count on an atmosphere of utter impunity. It's a bet many cops operating in Ferguson are making, and it seems to be a winning bet.

In his statement today, President Obama observed that "there's no excuse for excessive force by police or any action that denies people the right to protest peacefully," seeking to tap into the widespread view that some instances of excessive force and denial of first amendment rights have taken place. But Obama did not even vaguely hint that any officer of the law would or should face even the slightest sanction for this inexcusable behavior.

Statements from Governor Jay Nixon and Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson have suffered from the same problem. It is nice, of course, to hear that one's concerns are in some sense shared by the people in power.

But on another level, it would almost be nicer to hear that nobody in charge thinks there's been any misconduct. After all, a lack of police misconduct would be an excellent reason for a lack of any disciplinary action. What we have is something much scarier. Impunity. The sense that misconduct will occur and even be acknowledged without punishment. Of course there are some limits to impunity. Shoot an unarmed teenager in broad daylight in front of witnesses, and there'll be an investigation. But rough up a reporter in a McDonalds for no reason? Tear-gas an 8 year-old? Parade in front of the cameras with no badges on? No problem.

(Pew Center)

According to a Pew poll released earlier today, most white people have a good amount of confidence in the investigation into Michael Brown's death. They have the good sense, however, to at least admit to some misgivings about the handling of the protests.

What they ought to see is that the two are hardly so separable. The protests would not be handled so poorly if the officers doing the handling felt that they were accountable for their actions. And a policing culture that doesn't believe cops should be accountable for their actions is not a culture that lends itself to a credible investigation.

The vast majority of gasoline pumps in this country offer you three choices: regular gasoline (usually labeled as 87 octane), mid-grade (89 octane), and premium (92 or 93 octane).

For most people, if your car is running well, there's no reason to buy premium gas

Lots of people are uncertain about the differences between these gas types. Some imagine that occasionally treating their car to premium gas might increase performance or gas mileage — or somehow clean out the car's engine.

The truth: if your car is running smoothly and your manual doesn't instruct otherwise, there's absolutely no reason to waste money on premium or mid-grade gas.

Here's an explanation of the difference between these grades of gasoline — and why regular is the way to go for most people.

What's the difference between regular and premium gas?

(Photo Illustration by Miguel Villagran/Getty Images)

Gasoline is a blend of various chemicals produced when petroleum (that is, crude oil) is processed. Most of these chemicals are hydrocarbons: molecules made up of hydrogen and carbon atoms bonded together.

In total, there are about 200 different hydrocarbons in gasoline, and one of these forms is especially noteworthy: isooctane. It's made up of 8 carbon and 18 hydrogen atoms bonded together in a particular way.

Isooctane is important because it's resistant to something bad that can happen inside a car's engine — a process formally known as detonation and more commonly called "knocking" or "pinging."

Inside the engine, there's an area called a cylinder into which air and fuel are pumped (they're shown as blue in the graphic). When the spark plug ignites this mixture, it causes it to combust, which produces a huge amount of pressure that pushes the piston, ultimately causing the car's crankshaft to turn. This combustion is what powers your car's wheels as it cruises down the road.

But the combustion doesn't happen instantaneously — it takes a brief moment for the flame to spread throughout the cylinder. And under certain conditions, the air and gas in more distant parts of the cylinder can independently start burning before the main flame has reached it (in some cases, before the spark plug has even gone off). This is called knocking — because of the sound that's sometimes made as the two flames collide — and it's not great for your car's engine.

Isooctane is relevant here because it requires especially high pressure to ignite, so gasoline blends that are high in octane are less likely to produce knocking. Its opposite is another hydrocarbon called n-heptane, which is especially prone to ignition — so if used alone would produce knocking regularly.

Because these two hydrocarbons are at the extremes, they're used as benchmarks to produce something called an octane rating. A fuel with an octane rating of 100 can withstand as much compression as pure octane before combusting. One with a rating of 0 combusts readily, like pure n-heptane.

Commercial gasoline falls in between. So-called premium gas has a 93 rating, which means it combusts as readily as a mix of 93 percent octane and 7 percent n-heptane (although it actually has a mix of many other hydrocarbons). Mid-grade has a rating of 89, and regular has a rating of 87.

Why you probably don't need to buy premium gas

All this might make it seem like buying premium gas is a good idea. But in truth, for the vast majority of cars on the market, it's simply not necessary to prevent knocking.

The main reason is that these cars are specifically designed to run on gasoline with an 87 rating. The amount of pressure created by their engines' pistons does not generally lead 87-rated gas to detonate without a spark plug, so knocking does not occur.

most cars are specifically designed to run on gas with an 87 rating

In addition, most cars built since 1996 or so are equipped with something called a knock sensor. This device detects knocking and alters the timing of the spark plug firing to stop it from happening.

And even if you do hear a ping or knock here or there, it's not the end of the world. If it happens on a routine basis, the extra pressure it creates can cause damage to the engine, but occasionally knocking won't do a ton of harm.

The phrase "high-octane gasoline" might sound like it packs more energy — so could theoretically give you better gas mileage — but that's simply not the case. There's also a persistent myth that an occasional tank of premium gas will clean out deposits in your car's engine, but that's not true either.

Premium gas won't cause any damage to your car, but its downside is obvious: it costs more money, typically 20 cents per gallon.

The rare cases where premium gas is actually worth it

The fancy Jaguar F-type does require premium gas. (Photo by Joe Scarnici/Getty Images)

A minority of cars — typically high-performance luxury vehicles — is designed with mid-grade or premium gas in mind. The car's manual (and probably its salesperson) will tell you if this is the case.

Using premium gas can allow automakers to design cylinders that create more pressure before combustion occurs, which in turn allows them to extract more power from gasoline. (It doesn't mean, however, that putting premium gas in a normal engine will lead to more power — it's the cylinder design that's crucial.)

On the whole, these cars will get slightly better performance from premium gas. But in many cases they'll still be fine with regular — they won't accelerate quite as powerfully, but their knock sensors will generally be able to prevent knocking. Some of these cars, however, do require premium on a consistent basis.

The auto website Edmunds.com has put together comprehensive lists of all cars made since 2009 for which premium gas is simply recommended and the other cars for which it's required. If your car is on the recommended list, you generally can opt to save money with regular.

The one exception: if you're forcing the engine to do a ton of work — say, climbing up a hill while accelerating and carrying a high amount of weight — the knock sensor may not be able to compensate. If you hear a lot of knocking from your car's engine when you're pushing it hard, that may justify paying a bit more for premium gasoline.

But in most cases for even these fancy cars — and in all cases for normal cars — regular gas will do just fine.

This week marks the 15th anniversary of the release of the band LFO's debut album, LFO. Short for "Lyte Funky Ones," LFO is the very definition of a one-hit wonder, and this is an appropriate time to celebrate that one hit, as August 1999 was also when that song, "Summer Girls" hit number three on the US Billboard charts.

Famed for basically just being a bunch of gibberish that rhymes, "Summer Girls" is one of the most inexplicable hits in US history. That said, the song has a bunch of nouns, which left us wondering: what did all of those nouns mean? Sounds like it's time for a complete annotation!

First, listen to the song to refresh your memory.

New Kids on the Block

What is this: A famed boy band from the late '80s and early '90s, NKOTB preceded LFO in the realm of writing anodyne pop music. LFO says they had "a bunch of hits" ("a bunch of" is LFO's favorite numerical modifier). Said hits include "Hangin' Tough" and "The Right Stuff."

Chinese food

What is this: Chinese food was perhaps best known to LFO in its Americanized form, served at so-called "Chinese restaurants" that are dotted throughout the United States. Usually a dish of meat and vegetables served over a bed of rice, Chinese food is a popular ethnic cuisine in the US. LFO may have eaten it at such fine dining establishments as Panda Express or PF Chang's.

Abercrombie & Fitch

What is it: A popular clothing chain in US malls in the 1990s, Abercrombie & Fitch was best known for having clothes that popular kids might want to wear. This explains why LFO "likes girls that wear Abercrombie & Fitch." The implication is that only an attractive girl would wear Abercrombie & Fitch. It's possible LFO's view is skewed by the clothes being a status symbol.

Hip hop marmalade

What is this: This is literally incomprehensible gibberish. There is no such thing. But there should be.

Spic 'N Span

What is this: A popular household cleaner, Spic 'N Span was invented by two Michigan housewives. It continues to be sold to this day.

Larry Bird (left) and Magic Johnson, prior to the 1991 NBA season. (Photo by Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images)

Larry Bird (Jersey 33)

Who is this: One of the greatest basketball players of all time, Larry Bird scored 21,791 points during his 13 seasons with the Boston Celtics. He had been long retired by 1999, so it might have made more sense for LFO to name-drop scoring leaders for the 1998-99 season, such as Shaquille O'Neal, Allen Iverson, or, of course, Shareef Abdur-Rahim. Once one considers that LFO hails from Fall River, Massachusetts, however, its Bird hagiography becomes more explicable.

Billy Shakespeare

Who is this: William "Billy" Shakespeare is roundly acclaimed as the greatest writer to ever have written in the English language. The author of numerous classic plays, including Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, and King Lear, Shakespeare was also responsible for, in LFO's words, "a whole bunch of sonnets." More recently, This American Life host Ira Glass proclaimed Shakespeare unrelatable.

Sonnets

What is this: A famous poetic form. Written in iambic pentameter, sonnets follow a very specific line scheme and feature a "turn" or "volta" around the ninth of 14 lines. But have sonnets endured? How many people do you see writing sonnets today? And how many people write gibberish? "Summer Girls" FTW.

Willie Whistle

Who is this: Most likely, LFO is referring to a clown with a high-pitched voice who served as a children's host on Boston's WSBK. It is also possible this lyric refers to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration children's character "Willie Whistle." Much, much less likely is that this lyric refers to penis-shaped whistles sometimes given out as party favors, but one never knows.

Macaulay Culkin

Who is this: The star of the first two Home Alone films and several other movies, Culkin saw his popularity fade after he hit puberty. Most recently, Culkin was in a Velvet Underground cover band that turned songs by the group into songs about pizza.

Home Alone

What is this: The aforementioned film that brought Culkin to fame. It concerns a young boy who is left "home alone" when his family accidentally leaves him behind over the Christmas holidays. He has to protect his home from burglars. The film grossed over $285 million at the US box office upon its release in 1990.

Michael J. Fox

Who is this: The star of Family Ties and Back to the Future, Fox was riding high in 1999, upon his return to TV in the show Spin City. He remains a beloved figure to this day, even if his recent sitcom, The Michael J. Fox Show, was swiftly canceled. His visibility as someone with Parkinson's disease has done much to boost awareness of the condition.

Alex P. Keaton

Who is this: Fox's Family Ties character is considered the fictional standard-bearer of the 1980s Reagan revolution. The ultra-conservative son of liberal parents, Fox won four Emmys for playing him.

Cherry Pez

What is this: A cherry-flavored version of the popular, tiny hard candies that are usually housed in "Pez dispensers," which are usually shaped like cartoon characters.

Cold Crush

What is this: Most likely, LFO refers here to the seminal early hip-hop group "The Cold Crush Brothers," best known for their 1984 single "Fresh, Wild, Fly and Bold." The group is often held up as an example of record company exploitation of early hip-hop artists, though it seems incredibly unlikely LFO is referring to this serious issue in "Summer Girls."

Rockstar Boogie

What is this: This also seems to be gibberish. There's a musical artist named Rockstar Boogie, but he seems to post-date this song. Maybe he has LFO to thank for his name.

Here is a b-boy. (de2marco / Shutterstock.com)

B-Boy Style

What is this: Is LFO's "Summer Girls" an early example of bland white people appropriating hip-hop culture to seem cooler than they actually are? Quite possibly. But at least LFO knows that the more mainstream term of "breakdancing" isn't as widely acknowledged within the hip-hop community as "b-boying." Who knows why the word "style" is thrown in here, as no one in LFO dresses or dances like a b-boy.

New Edition

What is this: One of the earliest "boy bands," New Edition was an important progenitor of groups like the New Kids and, yes, LFO. Also, the R&B group came from Boston, which seems like a key distinction for LFO, whose members apparently don't mind entirely living up to popular stereotypes of Bostonians. Among New Edition's members was Bobby Brown.

"Candy Girl"

What is this: One of New Edition's earliest hits, "Candy Girl" is an infectious good time. Watch the group perform the song on Soul Train here.

Georgia

What is this: Here, LFO refers to the American state, whose capital, Atlanta, is an important hub of US commerce, rather than the country Georgia. We know this because LFO refers to Georgia in connection to "peaches," and peaches have a stronger association with the US Georgia than the country. Also, we're doubting that LFO ever thought much about the country Georgia.

Peaches

What is this: A popular summertime fruit, peaches are often best served with a little ice cream. Enjoy them on your back porch on a lazy August evening, the sky rolling over with clouds that will become a thunderstorm later. It's what LFO would want.

Mmmm... ice cold lemonade. (Shutterstock.com)

Lemonade

What is this: This drink is made by combining simple syrup with lemon juice to create a sour yet sweet beverage that is heavily associated with the summertime. Should you wish to make your own lemonade, Real Simple has four recipes.

Hip hop

What is this: The dominant musical style in the United States at the moment, hip hop came into prominence as rap, and while it is still primarily dominated by that form, it also features elements of R&B, soul, and pop. Some of the most popular hip hop artists of the past several years include Jay Z and Kanye West.

Rock 'n roll

What is this: Generally considered to have begun with the release of Bill Haley and the Comets's "Rock Around the Clock," which the group recorded in 1954. Heavily influenced by the blues, jazz, country, and other early 20th century music forms, rock 'n roll generally features small groups heavy on guitar and a pronounced backbeat. In case you haven't heard, it's dead. "Summer Girls" killed it.

Dad

Who is this: The male parent of a child, usually biological, but occasionally adopted. In "Summer Girls," the summer girl's dad skipped town, which makes him a jackass and gives this song its poignancy.

Paul Revere

Who is this: Famed for his late night ride, immortalized in a poem by Henry Wadworth Longfellow, Paul Revere rode from Boston to Lexington in April of 1775, warning those loyal to the revolutionary cause that the British were coming. He was also responsible for the phrase "one if by land, two if by sea," the latter half of which is a terrible Denis Leary movie. His father was named Apollos Rivoire, which is a great name, and this is just another Massachusetts reference in this song. Let it go, LFO.

Fun Dip

What is this: Originally known as Lik-M-Aid, Fun Dip is basically flavored sugar directly dispensed to kids. To consume it, tear open the pouch, pull out the edible utensil, and coat it in your saliva. Then dip it into the sugar and lick the sugar off the stick. Sounds gross when we put it that way, huh?

Cherry Coke

What is this: The popular beverage Coca Cola, mixed with cherry flavor. Originally, it was just Coke mixed with grenadine, but since 1985, Coke bottlers have offered the drink in bottle, can, and fountain form.

Boogaloo Shrimp

Who is this: He played Turbo, one of the most popular characters in the film Breakin' and its sequel Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers was a breakdancer back when it was still sort of okay to refer to it as breakdancing. His routines are still fun to watch.

Pogo sticks

What is this: A vertical mode of transportation that involves the traveler standing upright on a stick with a spring attached to its bottom. The user's feet are planted on a bar along the bottom of the stick, followed by bouncing along on the spring. It is not a terribly efficient mode of travel.

Mr. Limpet

Who is this: Played by Don Knotts, Mr. Limpet was a man who wished to become a fish, then somehow got his incredibly lame wish granted when he fell into the water one day. From there, he worked with the US Navy to defeat the Axis in World War II. We wish we were making the plot of this movie up. Many have tried to mount a remake of the film — most recently Boyhood director Richard Linklater — but it has yet to happen.

The color purple

What is this: It's hard to know if LFO refers to the acclaimed novel by Alice Walker, which was also made into a film directed by Steven Spielberg, or the actual color purple, which resides on the blue-ish end of the spectrum and is created in the children's book The Color Kittens by mixing red and blue. But because this is immediately followed by "macaroni and cheese," we're guessing it means the latter. The former would be messed up.

Macaroni and cheese

What is this: An enormously popular dish, this usually involves elbow macaroni coated in a kind of cheese cream sauce. Or, more likely, it means the boxed dinner from Kraft foods, which you might remember from your childhood. We would like some right now. Please make it for us.

Ruby red slippers

What is this: Worn by Dorothy on her feet throughout the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz (though, pointedly, not in the book it was based on), the ruby red slippers allow Dorothy to return home by clicking her heels together and saying "There's no place like home." She stole them from a witch she killed by dropping a house on her. We would very much like to go home this deep into this article.

A bunch of trees. (Shutterstock.com)

A bunch of trees

What is this: Coniferous or deciduous, trees are among our most persistent, hardiest forms of plant life. You probably saw one today, though it's possible you did not see "a bunch of" them. "A bunch of" is reserved exclusively for LFO.

Kevin Bacon

Who is this: Star of many popular films and the abhorrent TV series The Following, Kevin Bacon was probably best known at the time of "Summer Girls's" release thanks to the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game, in which one attempts to connect any actor on Hollywood to Kevin Bacon via six moves or less.

Footloose

What is this: A film about a young man who moves to a small town and teaches the people there about the wonders of dancing, getting them to loosen up about that one time some kids died in a car accident. That young man? Played by Kevin Bacon, so LFO is really pulling it all together. (Also, possibly, the Kenny Loggins theme to this movie, though this seems less likely.) Like Bacon's character in the film, LFO came to bring us a funkier future, but we rejected them and live only in the distinctly unfunky present.

There. Now you have a complete annotated "Summer GIrls." Do with it what you will.

Pebble is dead-serious about competing in the face of Android Wear and whatever Apple is presumably working on. To that end, the company has just announced that it has hired Itai Vonshak as head of product and UX and Liron Damir as head of design. Vonshak and Damir come to Pebble after working at LG, where they were instrumental in creating the user interface and design for webOS TV. Before that, they designed webOS for HP — though not everything they made there saw the light of day.

We spoke briefly with Vonshak, who says Pebble intends to focus heavily on a product-focused philosophy alongside a spirit of openness that's appealing to his webOS roots. Pebble's bet is that the wearable market won't shake out like the phone market has —...

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Safensoft writes: Symantec recently made a loud statement that antivirus is dead and that they don't really consider it to be a source of profit. Some companies said the same afterwards; some other suggested that Symantec just wants a bit of free media attention. The press is full of data on antivirus efficiency being quite low. A notable example would be the Zeus banking Trojan, and how only 40% of its versions can be stopped by antivirus software. The arms race between malware authors and security companies is unlikely to stop. On the other hand, experts' opinions of antivirus software have been low for a while, so it's hardly surprising. It's not a panacea. The only question that remains is: how exactly should antivirus operate in modern security solutions? Should it be one of the key parts of a protection solution, or it should be reduced to only stopping the easiest and most well-known threats? Threats aren't the only issue — there are also performance concerns. Processors get better, and interaction with hard drives becomes faster, but at the same time antivirus solutions require more and more of that power. Real-time file scanning, constant updates and regular checks on the whole system only mean one thing – as long as antivirus is thorough, productivity while using a computer goes down severely. This situation is not going to change, ever, so we have to deal with it. But how, exactly? Is a massive migration of everything, from workstations to automatic control systems in industry, even possible? Is using whitelisting protection on Windows-based machines is the answer? Or we should all just sit and hope for Microsoft to give us a new Windows with good integrated protection? Are there any other ways to deal with it?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sharon Standifird is a mom from Houston, Texas, who had a problem: Her children would not return her calls and texts on time. Frustrated and worried, she decided to take the matter into her own hands and create an app to specifically deal with teenagers who do not answer calls from parents on their smartphones, even though she didn’t actually know how to code.

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The more things change, the more they stay the same. In a bit of news that might make you wonder what millenia you're in, Pope Francis, normally quite a peacenik, has endorsed the use of military force against Islamic State (ISIS), the terrorist group and self-declared caliphate that has seized large chunks of Syria and Iraq and is terrorizing civilians, especially Christians, Yazidis, and other religious minorities.

ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (AP) _ Pope endorses use of force in Iraq to protect minorities; says UN should approve intervention.

— Ken Thomas (@AP_Ken_Thomas) August 18, 2014

There is good precedent for this. During the Middle Ages, between 1096 and 1272 AD, popes also endorsed the use of Western military action to destroy Middle Eastern caliphates. Those were known as the crusades; there were nine, which means that this would be number 10. The historical record suggests, though, that prior crusades were usually not endorsed from the comfort of jet-propelled airplanes, nor were they announced via Twitter.

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Fascinating and persuasive short film by C.G.P. Grey on the inevitable upheaval in employment opportunities wrought by automation:

Horses aren’t unemployed now because they got lazy as a species, they’re unemployable. There’s little work a horse can do that pays for its housing and hay.

And many bright, perfectly capable humans will find themselves the new horse: unemployable through no fault of their own.

Here is a photograph of a Sydney funnel-web spider, Atrax robustus.

I won’t explain the biology of this delightful animal here – you may read about it at Wikipedia in greater arachnological detail. Instead, I want to show the process by which I arrived at this composition. Most photographs involve some combination of creativity and constraint, and this one was no different.

Last month I spent a couple hours in Dr. David Wilson’s venom chemistry laboratory in Cairns, Queensland, with the opportunity to photograph a few of his study animals. With a tight schedule and several species to shoot, an elaborate session for any particular spider was out of the question. The goal, rather, was to create a dramatic, usable image in a few minutes’ time with one spider still in his cage.

Dr. Wilson coaxed one of the animals, a male A. robustus, part-way from its burrow, poking it to induce a standard threat display. The spider would then sit motionless for several minutes thereafter, fangs bared and legs raised. As someone used to frenetic ants, a sedentary spider was magic! The animal just posed, still as marble.

I put Canon’s 100mm macro lens on my camera, arranged two diffuse off-camera strobes for lighting, and started with a simple shot.

I thought the result was ok. In focus, at least. But not great. The extra silk at the bottom and in the background was distracting, and I wanted more spider. (How could you not want More Spider?!) So I moved closer:

Better!

But the background plastic remained distracting and ugly. I couldn’t remove the spider and have him retain this winning pose, so I instead took advantage of the translucence of the container. I moved one of the strobes behind the enclosure to overexpose the plastic to a pleasing white, and we teased the spider an extra half inch higher to clear it of some other schmutz. The new backlit background was better still:

Almost there! But I still wasn’t satisfied. The center of interest in this subject is the fearsome fangs, and in this capture their lines were not symmetrical, the one on the right didn’t stick out as far as its counterpart. So we rotated the container for the winning exposure:

Later, across the ocean and back at home, I applied a few digital tweaks to the levels for the final image:

I have no idea how I would have done this back in the film era.

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About the author: Alex Wild is an entomologist based out of Illinois who specializes in the evolutionary history of ants. In 2003 he founded a photography business as an aesthetic complement to his scientific work, and his natural history photographs appear in numerous museums, books, and media outlets. You can find more of his work on his website or by following him on Twitter. This article originally appeared here.

Skin cancer is on the rise, and New York-based artist Thomas Leveritt makes a stunning visual case for using sunscreen in his video "How the sun sees you."

Leveritt doesn't mince words: "We showed people what they looked like in ultraviolet and wondered aloud if they wanted to put on some damn sunscreen already."

The video first compares how we typically perceive people to what an ultraviolet camera shows — the latter can pick up on signs of aging that are imperceptible to the naked eye.

"WE WONDERED ALOUD IF THEY WANTED TO PUT ON SOME DAMN SUNSCREEN ALREADY."

The video then shows how polarized glasses — designed to block UVA and UVB rays — show up as black to the ultraviolet camera. The video's subjects are invited to slather on sunscreen, which also shows up as black thanks to its UV-blocking properties.

To learn more, read Julia Belluz's rundown of common myths and questions related to sunscreen.

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A lipid panel is one of the most basic blood tests in modern medicine. Doctors use it to measure cholesterol levels in their patients, probably millions of times each year.

This is not a procedure where some hospitals are really great at lipid panels and some are terrible. There's just not space for quality variation: you are running blood through a machine and pressing buttons. That's it.

And that all makes it a bit baffling why, in California, a lipid panel can cost anywhere between $10 and $10,000. In either case, it is the exact same test.

"What we were trying to see is, when we get down the simplest, most basic form of medicine, how much variation is there in price?" says Renee Hsia, an associate professor at University of California, San Francisco who published the price data in a recent study.

"It shows how big the variation really is. We're not talking twofold or threefold differences, it's a completely different level of magnitude."

More than 100 hospitals — with more than 100 different prices

For this research, published in August in the British Medical Journal, Hsia and her colleagues compiled reams of data about how much more than 100 hospitals charged for basic blood work. The prices these facilities charged consumers were all over the map.

The charge for a lipid panel ranged from $10 to $10,169. Hospital prices for a basic metabolic panel (which doctors use to measure the body's metabolism) were $35 at one facility — and $7,303 at another.

For every blood test that the researchers looked at, they found pretty giant variation:

This huge variation in the price of a really simple, incredibly basic blood test tells us a few things about the American health care system.

Blood tests aren't the only place with this variation

Hsia's previous research looked at the cost of an appendectomy in California and found similarly gigantic variation. For an appendectomy with no complications, she found that hospitals in the state would charge anywhere between $1,529 and $186,955.

One the issues with that study, she says, is that different hospitals might treat patients differently. "Some hospital might use more IV bags than others or one doctor could be ordering a lot of blood tests," she says.

The point of comparing an incredibly basic blood test, and its prices, was to distill down to a very basic test that offers no space for variation — but still has a huge range in how much hospitals will charge.

Not every patient pays the full charge rate: insurance companies, for example, typically negotiate a lower rate with the hospital. Medicare, which covers seniors, has a set fee schedule it uses. But these are the prices that an uninsured patient — who doesn't have a health plan bargaining on her behalf — could face.

"If I'm hospitalized, don't have insurance and my doctor orders three days worth of blood tests, this is what I'm getting billed for," Hsia says.

What this tells us about American health care

For one, there's not much price transparency: it's really hard to know whether one hospital is charging $10 or $10,169 because prices are rarely listed. For this particular study, Hsia literally had to hire a software engineer to collect the data and line up all the different hospitals against each other.

The $10,169 blood test tells us we're suckers: we've developed a health care system where its hospitals have pretty full authority to name their price with little protest from consumers.

For people with health insurance, really big price variation often isn't a concern. If their plan covers the bill, it doesn't matter to them, personally, whether they get the $10 test or the $10,000 one.

For those without coverage (or those whose coverage only covers a certain percent of the bill), price variation matters a lot. Getting a $10,000 blood test can put a patient into bankruptcy. But right now, our health care system doesn't have the mechanisms to limit those high charges — nor would the patient likely have the tools to know the cost of his or her blood test to begin with.

"There's no other industry where you see this kind of extreme variation," Hsia says. "And nobody has ever really challenged it. It shows an extreme inefficiency, and something we really need to change."

WATCH: 11 mind-blowing facts about American health care dysfunction