Burly.Thurr

In the penultimate episode of our series, Kathy Sierra tells us how one tweak could fix everything and ToE’s Chris tells us the secret origin of Facebook. PLUS #marksbros (as in Zuckerberg)  #marxhegel (as in Groucho)

***ALERT*** the DISLIKE CLUB Finale was commissioned by RADIOTONIC from the ABC’s Creative Audio Unit. Download it here. Or subscribe to their podcast. Look for the Dec 21st episode called the Dislike Club – that is part VI (the finale).

Yours truly is recuperating from 2014 in France but wishing you a happy holiday. Hope you enjoyed the programming this year. The dislike club series pretty much contains everything I have ever wanted to say about social media. Been thinking about all this stuff for quite some time now,  but it all started to crystalize when I got invited to Russia three years ago. I made a show about that trip for my old radio program “too much information” (it used to run on WFMU). I updated it a bit and offer it here, as the ToE 2014 holiday special – or the dislike club prequel.

***ALERT*** heard from a bunch of you now that you can’t find the DISLIKE CLUB Finale. Just search for this word: RADIOTONIC and you will find a radio show called Radiotonic from the ABC’s Creative Audio Unit. They commissioned the finale. Download it here. Or subscribe to their podcast. Look for the Dec 21st episode called the Dislike Club – that is part VI (the finale).

Design Crush

I'm getting a lot of emails about a ridiculous prediction by Stephanie Seneff that "half of all children will be autistic by 2025". As far as I can tell, this is more of the same as what she was peddling in a 2013 article about glyphosate, and that one was really egregious. You see all these references to "Researchers at MIT Find Glyphosate Killing Everyone!" and the like, but that paper had no original research in it whatsoever - and although it seems to cite everything possible, it manages to miss the most important invalidating evidence. Just so my feelings about it are clear: from everything I can see, Seneff's views on glyphosate seem to me to be tendentious and shoddily backed up, and do not deserve one-tenth the credit that many people seem to be willing to give her.

The web site that's pushing this autism figure, in case you're wondering, also goes on about the "coverup" of the link to the MMR vaccine. This thoroughly discredited (and discreditable) claim tells me all I need to know about them - anyone pushing this line has disqualified themselves, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not going to link to them, and I'm not going to spend more of my vacation time debunking them line by line. That earlier blog post linked to above goes into more detail about just why, but that's the short answer. This is not "a new study", these are not "respected researchers", and this is not "an alarming new development". This is a load of crap. Far more is known about glyphosate toxicology and pharmacokinetics than you could ever imagine by reading it.

larstheyeti:

The One (comic by theawkwardyeti)

doctorbloo22:

teafective:

the-illusion-of-sanity:

i have space hair now

How do you do this oh mY GOD

Holy Shit.

The New Yorker

Better come up with a good story

1. After major movie theaters refused to show The Interview in the wake of terrorist threats against the film after a hack on Sony Pictures, the studio pulled the movie from its Christmas Day release plan.
2. In response, indie-theaters decided to show Team America: World Police, a movie that features former North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il as a singing marionette, as a replacement for The Interview.
3. Paramount Pictures, the studio behind Team America has called off all of those showings.

Why did Paramount ban the showings of Team America?

Several theaters across the country reported on Twitter that they had received top-down orders from Paramount not to show the movie in place of The Interview.

Breaking Plaza news : Team America World Police pulled from all theatres as per Paramount Pictures .

— Plaza Atlanta (@PlazaAtlanta) December 18, 2014

Please note: Our Late Shift screening of Team America: World Police has been canceled by Paramount Pictures. pic.twitter.com/TlPVzIeICW

— Capitol Theatre (@CapitolW65th) December 18, 2014

Paramount has not sent out an official statement explaining why it has decided to cancel these impromptu screenings of Team America: World Police.

The battle over untapped natural gas in New York State appears to have reached its end. Following an extensive public health review of hydraulic fracturing, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a complete ban on the oil and natural gas harvesting practice in the state on Wednesday.

The 184-page report, conducted by the New York State Department of Health, cites potential environmental impacts and health hazards as reasons for the ban. The research incorporates findings from multiple studies conducted across the country and highlights the following seven concerns:

• Respiratory health: The report cites the dangers of methane emissions from natural gas drilling in Texas and Pennsylvania, which have been linked to asthma and other breathing issues. Another study found that 39 percent of residents in southern Pennsylvania who lived within one kilometer of a fracking site developed upper-respiratory problems compared with 18 percent of those who lived more than two kilometers away.
• Drinking water: Shallow methane-migration underground could seep into drinking water, one study found, contaminating wells. Another found brine from deep shale formations in groundwater aquifers. The report also refers to a study of fracking communities in the Appalachian Plateau where they found methane in 82 percent of drinking water samples, and that concentrations of the chemical were six times higher in homes close to natural gas wells. Ethane was 23 times higher in homes close to fracking sites as well.
• Seismic activity: The report cites studies from Ohio and Oklahoma that explain how fracking can trigger earthquakes. Another found that fracking near Preese Hall in the United Kingdom resulted in a 2.3 magnitude earthquake as well as 1.5 magnitude earthquake.
• Climate change: Excess methane can be released into the atmosphere, which contributes to global warming. One study predicts that fracking in New York State would contribute between 7 percent and 28 percent of the volatile organic compound emissions, and between 6 percent and 18 percent of nitrogen oxide emissions in the region by 2020.
• Soil contamination: One analysis of a natural gas site found elevated levels of radioactive waste in the soil, potentially the result of surface spills.
• The community: The report refers to problems such as noise and odor pollution, citing a case in Pennsylvania where gas harvesting was linked to huge increases in automobile accidents and heavy truck crashes.
• Health complaints: Residents near active fracking sites reported having symptoms such as nausea, abdominal pain, nosebleeds, and headaches according to studies. A study in rural Colorado which examined 124,842 births between 1996 and 2009 found that those who lived closest to natural gas development sites had a 30 percent increase in congenital heart conditions. The group of births closest to development sites also had a 100-percent increased chance of developing neural tube defects.

In 2008, New York State suspended its fracking activities pending further research into the health, environmental, and economic effects. Since the moratorium six years ago, many different scientific groups have conducted hydraulic fracturing research, as the state’s report reflects.

Howard Zucker, the acting state health commissioner who helped spearhead the report, addressed the ban with Gov. Cuomo in Albany. “I cannot support high-volume hydraulic fracturing in the great state of New York,” said Zucker, according to The Wall Street Journal. He added, “I asked myself, ‘would I let my family live in a community with fracking? The answer is no,” The Los Angeles Times reported.

But Cuomo and Zucker’s critics were quick to blast the ban, which they say will cost the state millions in jobs and energy. Dean Skelos, the Republican co-leader of the New York State Senate, said the move was shaped by politics, not science. “The decision implies that at least 30 other states, Senator Schumer and the Obama Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency are wrong about the health impacts and do not care about the well-being of millions of American citizens,” he said in a statement. Others have lashed against Zucker’s comments about not letting his family live in a fracking community despite not having children.

Zucker also voiced concern over how little is known about the long-term effects of injecting water and chemicals into the Marcellus shale, the disputed natural gas reserve that has been the subject of debate in New York and elsewhere. The new report, he said, highlights gaps in the current scientific understanding of fracking’s impact on groundwater resources, air quality, radon exposure, noise exposure, traffic, psychosocial stress, and injuries.

“The bottom line is we lack the comprehensive longitudinal studies, and these are either not yet complete or are yet to be initiated," Zucker said according to The Syracuse Post-Standard. "We don't have the evidence to prove or disprove the health effects. But the cumulative concerns of what I've read gives me reason to pause."

"What better way to take back the Internet than to use technology Hollywood has been scared to use?"

In the days after Sony canceled the theatrical release of the Seth Rogen, James Franco comedy The Interview, the studio has so far failed to make any alternative distribution arrangements, in part because crucial Video On Demand partners are unwilling to assume the risk of a potential new cyberattack. But San Francisco-based BitTorrent, whose Bundle service enables large media file sharing with a paygate that protects and monetizes downloadable content, says it will happily step up if Sony is game.

Read Full Story

Austrian actor Christoph Waltz explains Krampus, the fearsome holiday demon of European Christmas tradition, to Jimmy Fallon in a clip from the December 16, 2014 episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

Krampus riding a flaming cart. Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images

toonsontap:

Cosplayer and burlesque performer Charlie Quinn posed for us last month in her Dot Matrix and Hexadecimal costumes from the television show ReBoot.

All photos are courtesy of Jeffrey Danyleyko.

 The New Yorker

Beer foam is a noted fun-killer. Few things ruin the enjoyment of a cold one more than having your hands and clothes drenched in your drink. But now, Belgian food scientists have found a way to prevent this party-foul: with magnets!

So what causes a freshly opened, unshaken beer bottle to overflow? The main culprit is a protein called hydrophobin which dwells within the drink. Hydrophobins are created by a fungus that infects malt grains during the brewing process, attracting carbon-dioxide molecules within the beverage to the surface. Too many carbon-dioxide molecules at the beer's neck can cause the bottle to bubble over when it's opened, much to breweries' chagrin. This spontaneous foam overflow, called gushing, is a different process than what produces a frothy foam head in a freshly poured glass.

To thwart the hydrophobins, brewers add extra hops into the mix. The hops, in addition to giving beer a bitter taste, act as an antifoaming agent that prevents the proteins from binding with carbon dioxide. But even with extra hops, beer can still erupt like a sudsy volcano. The Belgian scientists decided to try magnets after noticing that magnetic fields can disperse particles and help emulsify mayonnaise. So the team brewed a batch of beer in the Belgian Orval Brewery and after adding in the hops, passed the concoction through a glass tube that had a magnet wrapped around it.

What they found was that when the brew passed through the magnetic field, the hops broke apart and spread throughout the beverage, effectively increasing their surface area. With more surface area, the tiny antifoaming particles bound with more hydrophobins than whole hops could, the team reported in a paper set to appear in the January edition of the Journal of Food Engineering.

After the brew was complete, the team found not only that magnetized beer produced less foam, it only took a minute to achieve the results. The information allowed them to experiment with adding less hops, effectively making the beer less bitter.

Do androids dream of electronic dystopian novels? 

Why do some places on Earth have higher gravity than others?

"Mythbusters fire a soccer ball at 50mph out of a cannon on a truck driving at 50mph in the opposite direction." [via]

From Quora, an answer to the question "If we pour water on the sun with a bucket as big as the sun, will the sun be extinguished?"

The probable answer is "no." The Sun involves a special type of fire that is able to "burn" water, and so it will just get hotter, and six times brighter.

Water is 89% oxygen BY MASS. And the Sun's overall density is 1.4 times that of water. So if you have a volume of water the VOLUME of the Sun, it will have 1/1.4 = 0.71 times the mass of the Sun, and this mass will be .71*.89 = 63% of a solar mass of oxygen and 8% of a solar mass of hydrogen. The Sun itself is 0.74 solar masses of hydrogen and 0.24 solar masses of helium.

So you end up with a 1.7 solar mass star with composition 48% hydrogen, 37% oxygen, and 14% helium (with 1% heavier elements).

Now, will such a star burn? Yes, but not with the type of proton-proton fusion the Sun uses. A star 1.7 times the mass of the Sun will heat up and burn almost entirely by the CNO fusion cycle, after making some carbon and nitrogen to go along with all the oxygen you've started with. So with CNO fusion and that mass you get a type F0 star with about 1.3 times the radius and 6 times the luminosity of the present Sun, and a temperature somewhat hotter than the Sun (7200 K vs. the Sun's 5800 K). It will be bluish-white, with more UV. That, along with that 6 times heat input, will cause the Earth's biosphere to be fried, and oceans to probably boil.

Well, we probably shouldn't do that then. (via gizmodo)