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02 Oct 11:08

DJI Mavic 3 Pro Cine Review: A Movie Studio in the Sky

by Eric Ravenscraft
Three powerful cameras and some of the smartest obstacle detection in the business makes for a versatile flying camera system.
16 Sep 10:31

Adam Savage tests whether his Iron Man suit is bulletproof (video)

by David Pescovitz

Adam Savage built an impressive replica of Tony Stark's Iron Man suit. It's fashioned from titanium which delights Adam to no end. Is it bulletproof though?

"If it is," Adam says, "well, then it has crossed that divide from costume to real armor." — Read the rest

30 Jul 21:28

All Calories are Created Equal? Your Gut Microbes Don't Think So

by EditorDavid
"For years scientists have believed that when it comes to weight gain, all calories are created equal," the Washington Post reported last month. "But an intriguing new study, published in the journal Nature Communications, suggests that's not true. The body appears to react differently to calories ingested from high-fiber whole foods vs. ultra-processed junk foods." The reason? Cheap processed foods are more quickly absorbed in your upper gastrointestinal tract, which means more calories for your body and fewer for your gut microbiome, which is located near the end of your digestive tract. But when we eat high-fiber foods, they aren't absorbed as easily, so they make the full journey down your digestive tract to your large intestine, where the trillions of bacteria that make up your gut microbiome are waiting. By eating a fiber-rich diet, you are not just feeding yourself, but also your intestinal microbes, which, the new research shows, effectively reduces your calorie intake. The study reveals that inside all of us, our gut microbes are in a tug of war with our bodies for calories, said Karen D. Corbin, an investigator at the AdventHealth Translational Research Institute of Metabolism and Diabetes in Orlando and the lead author of the study. The closely-tracked study participants ate foods "like crispy puffed rice cereal, white bread, American cheese, ground beef, cheese puffs, vanilla wafers, cold cuts and other processed meats, and sugary snacks and fruit juices." Then they switched to the "microbiome enhancer diet," with foods like "oats, beans, lentils, chickpeas, brown rice, quinoa and other whole grains" (plus fruits, nuts and vegetables). Despite getting "the same amount of calories and similar amounts of protein, fat and carbohydrates," the Post reports that "On average, they lost 217 calories a day on the fiber-rich diet, about 116 more calories than they lost on the processed-food diet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Apr 02:49

Don't Baby Your Eggs, Coddle Them

by Claire Lower

Out of all the different ways one can cook an egg, poaching gives people the most trouble. Poaching an egg isn’t impossible, but there is a steep learning curve, despite a lot of little tricks designed to make the task easier (a clear indication it’s not that easy in the first place). Poached eggs need to be coddled,…

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10 Apr 01:39

Crooks Are Using CAN Injection Attacks To Steal Cars

by BeauHD
"Thieves has discovered new ways to steal cars by pulling off smart devices (like smart headlights) to get at and attack via the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus," writes longtime Slashdot reader KindMind. The Register reports: A Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is present in nearly all modern cars, and is used by microcontrollers and other devices to talk to each other within the vehicle and carry out the work they are supposed to do. In a CAN injection attack, thieves access the network, and introduce bogus messages as if it were from the car's smart key receiver. These messages effectively cause the security system to unlock the vehicle and disable the engine immobilizer, allowing it to be stolen. To gain this network access, the crooks can, for instance, break open a headlamp and use its connection to the bus to send messages. From that point, they can simply manipulate other devices to steal the vehicle. "In most cars on the road today, these internal messages aren't protected: the receivers simply trust them," [Ken Tindell, CTO of Canis Automotive Labs] detailed in a technical write-up this week. The discovery followed an investigation by Ian Tabor, a cybersecurity researcher and automotive engineering consultant working for EDAG Engineering Group. It was driven by the theft of Tabor's RAV4. Leading up to the crime, Tabor noticed the front bumper and arch rim had been pulled off by someone, and the headlight wiring plug removed. The surrounding area was scuffed with screwdriver markings, which, together with the fact the damage was on the kerbside, seemed to rule out damage caused by a passing vehicle. More vandalism was later done to the car: gashes in the paint work, molding clips removed, and malfunctioning headlamps. A few days later, the Toyota was stolen. Refusing to take the pilfering lying down, Tabor used his experience to try to figure out how the thieves had done the job. The MyT app from Toyota -- which among other things allows you to inspect the data logs of your vehicle -- helped out. It provided evidence that Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in the RAV4 had detected malfunctions, logged as Diagnostic Trouble Codes (DTCs), before the theft. According to Tindell, "Ian's car dropped a lot of DTCs." Various systems had seemingly failed or suffered faults, including the front cameras and the hybrid engine control system. With some further analysis it became clear the ECUs probably hadn't failed, but communication between them had been lost or disrupted. The common factor was the CAN bus.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

21 Mar 22:43

All the US Presidents as Comic Book Villains

by Miss Cellania

If you got a kick out of Cam Harless' Gallery of US Presidents with Mullets, you're going to love his latest project. Presumably with the help of an artificial intelligence image generator, he has made comic book characters out of our presidents. Supervillains, to be exact. You'll love seeing Barack Obama as the Joker, Abraham Lincoln as a zombie, and others as various mad scientists, robots, aliens, warlocks, demons, butchers, and clowns. Since Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms, he gets to be both Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. I love how Franklin Roosevelt's wheelchair was incorporated into his supervillain persona. And although I never thought Calvin Coolidge looked anything like Edgar Allan Poe, it works in a comic book universe. It's still impossible to make Jimmy Carter look evil.   

See all 46 presidents plus a bonus Ben Franklin as comic book villains at Twitter. Or at Threadreader, if you prefer. -via Fark

09 Oct 21:19

A Strange Pumpkin-Orange Full Moon Rises in the Sky Tonight

by EditorDavid
Look at the full moon! Tonight it may appear larger and more orange than usual, reports Space.com, "taking on a fitting appearance for the fall season and for the build-up to Halloween." This is the result of something called the 'moon illusion' and the fact it is being viewed close to the horizon. The orange color comes about because as we look at the full moon close to the horizon, the light that it reflects towards us is passing through more of the Earth's atmosphere than when it is close to overhead. Molecules in Earth's atmosphere are really good at scattering photons of blue light which have shorter wavelengths than red light. This means that blue photons bounce around the sky before hitting our eyeâS — âS and that's why the sky is blue. Longer wavelength red photons slip right through these molecules and straight to our eye for the most part. When red photons reflected by the moon have to pass through the thickest part of the atmosphere at the horizon, the chance of them being bounced around is increased. That's why the moon appears redder when we look at it close to the horizon....

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12 Jul 15:49

The Video Game Prescribed By Doctors To Treat ADHD

by BeauHD
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: In 2020 [EndeavorRx] became the first such game to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in the treatment of ADHD in children. Currently only available on prescription from doctors in the US, EndeavorRx at first glance looks very similar to countless other games. You control a little alien that races on a spaceship through different worlds having to collect things. But the app-based game was developed in conjunction with neuroscientists, and is designed to stimulate and improve areas of the brain that play a key role in attention function. The idea is that it trains a child with ADHD to both better multitask and ignore distractions, with a computer algorithm measuring his or her performance and customizing the difficulty of the game in real time. When doctors prescribe it, the child's parents get sent an activation link that is needed before the game will play. Eddie Martucci, chief executive of Akili, the Boston-based tech firm behind EndeavorRx, says the game has been designed to boost cognitive progressing. "It is something that's very difficult to get through molecular means, like taking a pill. But it turns out that sensory stimuli can actually directly stimulate parts of the brain controlling cognitive function." His company now plans to launch the game in Europe in the next few years. Akili is one of only a handful of companies with clearance to offer a digital therapeutic as a prescription for medical conditions. Late last year, the FDA approved a virtual reality-based treatment for children with the visual disorder amblyopia, or lazy eye.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

23 Apr 05:46

How Much Garden You Would Need to 100% Survive On

by Jeff Somers

Gardening is often pitched as a relaxing, therapeutic activity—and it is relaxing and therapeutic! But it’s also a sign of how advanced society has become that we can regard growing food as a charming hobby instead of an absolute necessity. On the one hand, that’s a clear sign of mankind’s mastery over the world. On…

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04 Feb 10:52

An Alternative To Concrete

by Franzified

The search for eco-friendly materials, which we can use to build eco-friendly stuff, goes on as we try to solve the problem of climate change, and it seems that mushrooms are going to be of great help in our quest.

Mushrooms are helping architects and engineers solve one the world’s biggest crises: climate change. These fungi are durable, biodegradable, and are proving to be a good alternative to more polluting materials.
Materials made with mycelium, the fungal network from which mushrooms grow, might be able to help turn that around. They produce far less planet-heating carbon dioxide than traditional materials like cement. An added bonus is that mushrooms are biodegradable, so they leave behind less harmful waste than traditional building materials. Mushrooms can even help with clean-up efforts, feeding off things that might have otherwise ended up in a landfill, like sawdust or agricultural waste.

While materials made from mushrooms are still in the early stages of development, they’re already showing some promise as an insulation material and as an alternative to concrete blocks. And how do they perform? The Verge documents it in this video.

(Image Credit: The Verge/ YouTube)

09 Dec 11:34

Amazon, Amex To Fund Software Developers in New GitHub Program

by msmash
Amazon.com, American Express, Daimler AG and Stripe are among those joining a new GitHub program that will let companies directly fund open-source projects and software developers that are key to their businesses. From a report: It's an expansion of GitHub's Sponsors program, which previously let individuals support software projects and the millions of developers who use the digital platform to collaborate on, share and store code. GitHub, whose parent company Microsoft will also participate in the new service announced Tuesday, expects the change to dramatically increase the number of contributions. The year-old sponsors service has already generated enough money for some developers to rely on it as full-time work, said Devon Zuegel, GitHub's director of product for the communities department.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

14 Oct 11:43

Flour wins in this table listing foods by calories per dollar

by Andrea James

If 2020 has you pinching pennies, this site listing foods by calories per dollar may be helpful.

Engineer Michael Kirk says he was inspired to create the list after calculating cost per calorie of fast foods. He notes, "We think we know what food costs, but we have no idea what nutrition costs. We needed a way to value food."

The clear winner is wheat flour, which is also the winner in protein per dollar. If you'd rather not eat dry flour because it's a nice way to get salmonella, cheap white bread is not too bad for foods that require no prep. Slap some peanut butter on there and you have two top items in one delicious sandwich.

Image: Kaboompics

23 Jul 11:19

The Lincoln Project turns Trump's disastrous Fox interview into a Seinfeld parody

by Mark Frauenfelder

The Lincoln Project knows how to get under Trump's monomolecular skin. Its latest video, which uses clips from Trump's dumpster fire Fox interview, was edited into an episode of Trumpfeld, complete with laugh track.

19 Mar 19:45

Purism Librem Mini is a Tiny Linux Desktop

by msmash
Today, we get another diminutive desktop option, but this one is designed for Linux and privacy. From a report: Yes, Purism is finally launching a tiny desktop, and it will come pre-installed with the Debian-based PureOS. Called "Librem Mini," the cute bugger has 4 USB-A ports on the front, along with a 3.5mm audio jack, and the power button. On the rear, there are two more USB-A ports, a single USB-C port, Ethernet, HDMI, DisplayPort, and the power port. "Announcing the Purism Librem Mini. Our small form-factor mini-PC that puts freedom, privacy and security first. We're really excited about the Librem Mini, it's a device our community have wanted and we've wanted to offer for some time. The Librem Mini is accessible, small, light and powerful featuring a new 8th gen quad core i7 processor, up to 64 GB of fast DDR4 memory and 4k 60 fps video playback. It's a desktop for your home or oïfce, a media center for your entertainment, or an expandable home server for your files and applications," says Purism.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Feb 11:27

I Monitor My Teens' Electronics, and You Should Too

by Christopher Null
Kids should have no expectation of privacy on devices given to them by their parents, for better and for worse.
28 Nov 15:49

Don't Give People Presents That Are Actually Chores

by Nicole Dieker

If you’re getting started on your holiday shopping this weekend, here’s a tip: ask yourself whether you’re giving the recipient something they truly want, or something that will add extra work to their life.

Read more...

13 Nov 11:52

RISC-V: Why The ISA Battles Aren’t Over Yet

by Maya Posch

A computer processor uses a so-called Instruction Set Architecture to talk with the world outside of its own circuitry. This ISA consists of a number of instructions, which essentially define the functionality of that processor, which explains why so many ISAs still exist today. It’s hard to find that one ISA that works for as many distinct use cases as possible, after all.

A fairly new ISA is RISC-V, the first version of which was created back in 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley. Intended to be a fully open ISA, targeting both students (as a learning tool) and industrial users, it is claimed to incorporate a number of design choices that should make it more attractive for a number of applications.

In this article I’ll take a look behind the marketing to take stock of how exactly RISC-V differs from other open ISAs, including Power, SPARC and MIPS.

Welcome to the World of RISC

A Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) is a type of ISA which focuses on creating an instruction set that requires only a limited number of processor cycles to execute a single instruction. Ideally, an instruction would take exactly one cycle. This is in contrast to a Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC), which focuses on reducing the number of instructions needed for an application, which decreases code storage requirements.

These days CISC is essentially no more, with the Motorola m68k ISA put out to pasture, and any CPU based on Intel’s x86 CISC ISA and successors (like AMD’s 64-bit extensions) being internally a RISC processor with a CISC ISA decoder front-end that breaks CISC instructions into the RISC instructions (micro-opcodes) for its CPU core. At least as far as the CISC versus RISC ISA wars go, here we can say that RISC decidedly won.

Many flavors of RISC

Though RISC ISAs such as Alpha and PA-RISC met their unfortunate demise due to corporate policies rather than any inadequacies in their ISA design itself, we’re fortunately still left with a healthy collection of RISC ISAs today, most notably:

  • SuperH (with open J-2 implementation).
  • ARM (fully proprietary)
  • MIPS (open, royalty-free)
  • Power (open, royalty-free)
  • AVR (proprietary)
  • SPARC (open, royalty-free)
  • OpenRISC (open, royalty-free)

RISC-V as a newcomer places its 9 years of (academic) development against the 34+ years of MIPS, 33+ years of SPARC, and the Power ISA which has its roots in development IBM did back in the early 1970s. Considering the hype around this new ISA, there must be something different about it.

This also considering that OpenRISC, which was developed with many of the same goals as RISC-V back in 2000, never made much of a splash, even though it is being used commercially.

A Shifting Landscape

It’s important to note that back in 2010 when RISC-V was being developed, SPARC had been an open ISA for a long time, with ESA’s LEON SPARC implementation in VHDL having been available since 1997. Since 2010, MIPS and IBM’s Power ISA have also joined the ranks of open and royalty-free ISAs, with open source designs in Verilog, VHDL and others made available. MIPS has been a standard teaching tool for processor ISAs since the 1990s (usually based on DLX), with many students writing their own minimalistic MIPS core as part of their curriculum.

Because of the existing contenders in these areas, RISC-V cannot simply distinguish itself by being open, royalty-free, having a more mature ISA, or better freely available HDL cores. Instead its ISA must have features that make it attractive from the standpoint of power efficiency or other metrics, allowing it to process data more efficiently or faster than the competition.

Here one defining characteristic is that the RISC-V ISA isn’t a singular ISA, but over 20 individual ISAs, each focusing on a specific set of functionality, such as bit manipulation, user-level interrupts, atomic instructions, single- and double-precision floating point, integer multiplication and division, and so on. Also interesting in the RISC-V ecosystem is that adding custom instruction sets without any kind of approval process is encouraged.

Ignoring the Future

One interesting choice in the RISC-V ISA itself is in the subroutine calls and conditions, with RISC-V having no provision for a condition code register (status register), or a carry bit. This choice makes predication impossible, instead forcing the processor to execute every single branch in the expectation that one of them is correct, discarding the results of the other branches. As branch prediction is optional in RISC-V, this could come with a big performance and energy cost penalty.

Since every other major architecture uses predication to improve performance especially for blocks of shorter jumps, such as that produced by a big if/else block or switch statement, it’s quite daring to omit this feature. The provided design rationale by the RISC-V developers is that fast, out-of-order CPUs can overcome this limitation through brute processing force. Interestingly, they do not see the larger code size produced for code without predication to be an issue, despite being proud of their compact instructions being generally quite compact.

Here the somewhat schizophrenic nature of the RISC-V development process begins to shine through. Though it’s supposed to be a good fit for embedded, presumably low-clocked processors, its lack of predication will likely hurt it here in raw performance compared to equivalent ARM-based microcontrollers, whose Thumb-2 compact instruction set is also more efficient than the RISC-V compact ISA.

Choosing Uncertainty Over Certainty with RISC-V

At this point, the only parts of the RISC-V ISA which are ‘frozen’ – meaning that they can be implemented without any fundamental changes expected – are the Base Integer sets for the 32- and 64-bit version, as well as the extensions for integer multiplication and division, atomics, single- and double-precision floating point, as well as quad-precision floating point and compressed instructions.

Extensions such as the hypervisor, bit manipulation, transactional memory, and user-level interrupts are still in flux and thus unsuitable for anything but experimental use, further fragmenting the whole RISC-V ecosystem. This clearly shows that RISC-V isn’t a ‘finished’ ISA, but still very much in the early stages of development. While its core is usable, the embedded instruction set isn’t finished either, and there’s no readily available performance data to back up claims that it can handily outperform any competition.

Worse is probably the immaturity of the available HDL cores and software tools for RISC-V. With the stabilization of the ISA sets taking time, it’s no surprise that few cores and tools offer or expect anything beyond the basic (RV32I or RV64I) functionality. Without many more ISA sets being finished and incorporated into silicon, to a bystander there’s the interesting thought that maybe the major contribution of RISC-V to this renewed ISA war isn’t that of RISC-V being necessarily superior, or it even having any long-term commercial viability.

Showing How It’s To Be Done

Back in 2000 when the OpenRISC project took off, it appeared that the market didn’t quite have the appetite for open and freely available ISAs and associated processor designs. Today that seems to be quite different, and it was RISC-V, not OpenRISC that kicked off this change in corporate thinking that caused IBM to open up its Power ISA, along with the MIPS ISA and even the ARM ISA to a limited extent. RISC-V having DARPA funding when OpenRISC did not probably played a role here too, but who is counting?

Regardless of such details, it seems that the computer hardware industry has embarked on a new path, one where even a hobbyist has access to a number of well-supported HDL cores and is free to experiment with the ISA. Right now one can pick between fully open MIPS, SPARC, Power, RISC-V, and SuperH cores, with maybe some day a fully open ARM core becoming reality as well.

In some ways it evokes flashbacks to the 1980s, when amidst the rapidly growing home computer market, multiple CPU manufacturers struggled to make their ISA and their chips to be the most popular, with Zilog’s Z80 and of course the 6502 being strong 8-bit contenders before a little upstart called ‘Intel’ began to make inroads, culminating in the seemingly complete disappearance of ISA diversity on the desktop and most recently in video consoles.

Here’s to Diversity

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I have a longing for the days of dissimilar platforms (lest someone call me a daft bastard). Anyone working in the software industry during the formative years of personal computing will find themselves regressing through the traumatic memories of porting software between the Commodore 64 and ZX-Spectrum. Thinking that we have it so much better now is not such an extreme position to take.

That said, everyone with a sense of what competition means can see that a world with only Intel, or only AMD, or only ARM, or only RISC-V processors in everything would be rather dull indeed. It is the bouncing off of ideas, of comparing differences, that keeps people thinking and that keeps innovation going. Modern software practices should mean that cross-platform compatibility isn’t as much of an issue as it was back in the 1980s and 1990s.

Here’s to an open, diverse future in the world of ISAs.

20 Oct 21:28

The True Cost of Multimeters

by Al Williams

If you are building a home shop, it is common to try to get the cheapest gear you can possibly get. However, professionals often look at TCO or total cost of ownership. Buying a cheap car, for example, can cost more in the long run compared to buying an expensive car that requires less maintenance. Most consumers will nod sagely and think of ink jet printers. That $20 printer with the $80 cartridges might not be such a deal after all. [JohnAudioTech] bought a few cheap multimeters and now has problems with each of them. Maybe that $120 meter isn’t such a bad deal, after all.

The problems he’s seen are the same ones we’ve all seen: noisy selector switches, suspect display readings, and worn off lettering. You can see the whole story in the video below.

Although we get that [John] has $90 worth of meters that are not so great, we wish he’d given us an idea of one that he used that he did like. If you shop, though, you can get one really good meter for the cost of the three meters in the video and some of those will reliably last for decades.

There are cheaper meters, of course (with strange connections to felines). You can even get a Fluke meter for less than you might think.

08 Apr 11:00

Hexagons – The Crazy New Breadboard

by Bryan Cockfield

A breadboard is a great prototyping tool for verifying the sanity of a circuit design before taking the painstaking effort of soldering it all together permanently. After all, a mistake in this stage can cost a lot of time and possibly material, so it’s important to get it right. [daverowntree] wasn’t fully satisfied with the standard breadboard layout though, with fixed rows and columns. While this might work for most applications, he tried out a new type of prototyping board based on hexagons instead.

The design philosophy here revolves around tessellations, a tiling method for connecting the various components on this unique breadboard rather than using simple rows. The hexagons are tessellated across the board, allowing for some unique combinations that might make it slightly more complicated, but can have some benefits for other types of circuits such as anything involving the use of a three-wire device like a transistor.

The post is definitely worth a read, as [daverowntree] goes through several examples of this method of prototyping where the advantages are shown, like a voltage follower circuit and some other circuits involving transistor biasing. If you’re OK with the general design of breadboards, though, and just wished you didn’t have to do anything after the prototyping stage, we’ve got some help for you there as well.

07 Apr 23:44

New Apps Fight Robo-Calls By Pretending To Be Humans

by EditorDavid
"While lawmakers debate what to do about the roboscourge, engineers have cooked up some clever ways to make bots work for us, not against us," writes the Washington Post, taking a look at apps like the $4-per-month RoboKiller -- which offers malicious "answer bots": They're voicemail messages that try to keep robots and human telemarketers on the line, listening to nonsense. Answer bot options range from Trump impersonators and extended coughing sessions to someone doing vocal exercises. Even better, RoboKiller will send you an often-hilarious recording of the interaction. (It only uses these recordings when it's very sure it's a spam call.) Another service, called Jolly Roger, doesn't sell itself as a robocall blocker but takes this auto-generated annoyance idea a step further by actively trying to game the spammers' systems, such as when to press 1 to speak to a human. It calls this tech "artificial stupidity." It costs $11.88 per year. It's possible you're better off not engaging with a robocall in the hopes the dialer with decide the line is dead. And it's also not clear how much these actually cost the people placing robocalls. But any time robocallers spend with your bot might be minutes they're not calling someone else, so you can think of it as community service. I'm also not sure this does any good -- but the Post's article also includes a run-down of other robocall-blocking services available from both wireless carriers and independent companies. It recommends starting with the free YouMail app, which collates data from 10 million registered users to determine which calls to block -- and in addition, "tries to trick known robocallers into taking you off their lists by playing them the beep-beep-beep sound of a dead line." If you live in America, you can also add your phone number to the Federal government's official "Do not call" registry. "It won't help much," writes the Post, "but it only takes 30 seconds so why not?"

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27 Mar 10:06

My Kids Won’t Stop Gaslighting Me

by Drew Magary on The Concourse, shared by Virginia K. Smith to Lifehacker

If you’ve been around these internet parts for the past few years, you know all about gaslighting, wherein people stand behind a lie so fervently that they compel others to believe it as well, leaving marks unsure as to what is true and what really is the name of Apple CEO Tim Apple.

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20 Dec 10:52

Man who invented Keurig K-Cups regrets it

by Rob Beschizza

John Sylvan, the Keurig engineer who invented the K-Cup pod coffee system in the 1990s, regrets his mistake. It was intended for the corporate service market and the idea that people have these things in their homes leaves him "absolutely mystified."

He says he doesn't begrudge the company for its success, or for wanting to make money, but he does question consumers' slavish devotion to the things. The company's latest product, the Keurig 2.0, which allows users to use pods to make larger cups and pots of coffee, is a great example of that.

"I stopped when I was walking in the grocery store aisle and I said, 'What is that?'" Sylvan recalls. "I picked it up and looked at it and said, 'You have to be kidding me.' Now they want you to make a pot of coffee with a Keurig machine."

I switched to a Nespresso Essenza Mini [Amazon] a while back and it tastes much better. You can send in your pods to be recycled by Nespresso. It's "espresso", mind you, not "coffee". If you want coffee, just get an Aeropress, for Christ's sake.

Previously: The worst K-Cup coffee

29 Nov 11:44

What It Means to Diversify Your Assets 

by Alicia Adamczyk on Two Cents, shared by Alicia Adamczyk to Lifehacker

For Ron Swanson, diversifying assets means selling some gold to buy a majority interest in the Lagavulin whisky distillery. For the average retail investor, it’s going to look a little different.

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10 Sep 09:59

This One-Armed Robot Is Super Manipulative (in a Good Way)

by Matt Simon
Researchers have taught a robot to fish for boots, like in the cartoons. That could be big news for robots still struggling to get a grip on our complicated world.
09 Aug 10:32

AI Can Now Help Write Wikipedia Pages For Overlooked Scientists

by BeauHD
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: Plenty of prominent scientists have Wikipedia pages. But while checking to see if someone specific has a Wikipedia page is a quick Google search away, figuring out who should be on Wikipedia but isn't -- and then writing an entry for him or her -- is much trickier. For example, you may or may not have heard of Christina Economos. She doesn't have a Wikipedia page about her, although she's a professor at Tufts University and the New Balance Chair in childhood nutrition. But while she lacks a Wikipedia page, she does have a very short stub describing who she is professionally on a website made by a company called Primer. That little blurb, which could one day grow into a full-blown Wiki entry, was created by an AI system dubbed Quicksilver. The idea behind the project is to use AI as a jumping off point. Humans can use it to help them write Wikipedia pages for scientists who don't have them, but deserve to. For example, on Economos' Primer page, there's a link to an article from CBS Boston that mentions her -- a good potential source for a human Wikipedia editor who may want to write an entry for her. Primer launched officially last year and uses AI to read information and generate reports; part of its focus is doing the kind of work an intelligence analyst might do. Artificial intelligence generally needs data to learn from, and so for this project, Primer used around 30,000 existing scientist Wikipedia pages to train their machine learning systems. Then they fed 200,000 names and related employment information into their AI system. Those names came from the listed authors of scientific papers focused on computer science and biomedical research provided to Primer from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. If you're curious to see a sample, you can head on over to this page, which has 100 examples of AI-generated Wikipedia blurbs.

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30 Jun 13:57

Space Photos of the Week: Scientists Are Seeing Red Over Jupiter’s Spot

We'll get great new views of the iconic spot—if the James Webb Space Telescope ever gets off the ground.
13 Jun 11:20

LA's high-tech, thoughtful water management is cause for cautious optimism about adapting to climate change

by Cory Doctorow

Southern California is almost totally dependent on Sierra snowpack and the Colorado River for its water, and both sources are endangered by climate change, even as SoCal's cycle of long droughts and catastrophic, torrential rains gets more extreme thanks to climate change. (more…)

25 Apr 23:37

Roll Up Your Sleeve, Watch a Video with This Smart Watch Forearm Projector

by Dan Maloney

We’re all slowly getting used to the idea of wearable technology, fabulous flops like the creepy Google Glass notwithstanding. But the big problem with tiny tech is in finding the real estate for user interfaces. Sure, we can make it tiny, but human fingers aren’t getting any smaller, and eyeballs can only resolve so much fine detail.

So how do we make wearables more usable? According to Carnegie-Mellon researcher [Chris Harrison], one way is to turn the wearer into the display and the input device (PDF link). More specifically, his LumiWatch projects a touch-responsive display onto the forearm of the wearer. The video below is pretty slick with some obvious CGI “artist’s rendition” displays up front. But even the somewhat limited displays shown later in the video are pretty impressive. The watch can claim up to 40-cm² of the user’s forearm for display, even at the shallow projection angle offered by a watch bezel only slightly above the arm — quite a feat given the irregular surface of the skin. It accomplishes this with a “pico-projector” consisting of red, blue, and green lasers and a pair of MEMS mirrors. The projector can adjust the linearity and brightness of the display to provide a consistent image across the uneven surface. An array of 10 time-of-flight sensors takes care of watching the display area for touch input gestures. It’s a fascinating project with a lot of potential, but we wonder how the variability of the human body might confound the display. Not to mention the need for short sleeves year round.

Need some basics on the micro-electrical mechanic systems (MEMS) behind the pico-projector in this watch? We’ve got a great primer on these microscopic machines.

03 Apr 10:57

How Grubhub Analyzed 4,000 Dishes to Predict Your Next Order

by Adam Rogers
Online food-delivery service spent eight years resolving a classic problem of unstructured data.
17 Mar 13:14

96-year-old style icon Iris Apfel gets her own Barbie

by Rusty Blazenhoff

So, Mattel recently caught some slack after announcing a Frida Kahlo Barbie. Kahlo's estate is saying that the toy manufacturer didn't get permission from them to use her image and likeness. Mattel disputes the claim.

They did, however, get the blessing of "geriatric starlet" Iris Apfel to make a single Barbie doll in her likeness. Yes, just one.

The Cut reports:

Unfortunately, Iris Apfel Barbie is one of a kind. (Same as Iris Apfel herself.) But if you’d like to dress your regular degular Barbie just like her, that will soon be an option. This fall, Barbie will release a “Styled By” Barbie, complete with glasses and necklaces from Apfel’s own Rara Avis collection. In a photo taken “at the Carlyle Hotel” (one of Apfel’s haunts), Barbie even sports a new, short bob haircut to fit the profile.

Note that the emerald green Gucci suit the nonagenerian's Barbie is donning is styled after the one she wore on the cover of her new book, Iris Apfel: Accidental Icon.

(WOW)