firehose

awkwardladiesclub:

fanzines:

Messages From Your Friends Upon the Announcement of Your Breakup by the awkwardladiesclub of Alameda, California, U.S :)

YAY

hazelcills:

Here’s some advice: be wary of places on the Internet that don’t edit your work. If a place is publishing your writing as is they do not care about your work. I am very worried for the Thought Catalog generation that thinks its okay for their writing to go up without at least one other set of eyes on it and tweaking/reshaping/restructuring it, especially when it comes to zines and independent websites. I am immensely thankful to my many editors who actually EDIT my work because it means they care about it and they want it to be good. Not every place does it because they don’t want to waste time doing it. It is a privilege to be edited because you learn to be a better writer and I am so thankful for the publications who do it for me every day.

Under fire from regulators around the world, Uber is trying to make friends in the city of Boston by providing its municipal government with anonymized data on all the rides it serves in the area. Specifically, Uber will inform Boston's authorities about the distance traveled, the starting time and duration of a trip, and the zip code tabulation area (ZCTA) of the pick-up and drop-off. Much like the way Jawbone's Up fitness tracker can give insight on the sleeping patterns of a population, Uber's granular stats can help inform Boston's city and traffic planners by identifying the ebbs and flows of private transit.

The coding of trips according to ZCTA may make the rider superficially anonymous, but the level of detail could still lead to some trips being identifiable to a particular person. Still, Uber believes it's the right approach and promises it "will champion municipal efforts devoted to achieving data-driven urban growth, mobility and safety for communities."

Following hard on the heels of its $60 million deal with Genentech, personal genetics startup 23andMe has announced an agreement to share its user data and research platform with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Although 23andMe is still languishing under FDA restrictions (the company is only permitted to offer ancestry reports and raw genetic data to customers — not medical analysis), its well-organized database of some 640,000 genotyped individuals is proving popular with the medical industry.

"The largest dataset of its kind"

In a press statement announcing the deal, 23andMe spelled out the attractions of its genetic resources: "Researchers can now fully benefit from the largest dataset of its kind, running queries in minutes across more than 1,000 different diseases, conditions and traits. With this information researchers can identify new associations between genes and diseases and traits more quickly than ever before." The two companies will also collaborate on "genome-wide association studies, surveys, and clinical trial recruitment" starting with a 5,000-person study into lupus.

The genetic information in 23andMe's database is anonymized and voluntary. Customers who bought 23andMe's $99 saliva test kits are given the option to share their data for this sort of research — although it's likely that some individuals will still be uneasy that their genetic information is going to multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies. Nevertheless, for 23andMe, this data is a crucial product, not just in terms of revenue (the value of this latest deal with Pfizer has not been disclosed) but in bolstering its reputation as a serious player in the world of medical reseach.

Just as Google is coming under fire for publicizing a Windows bug two days before Microsoft released a fix, the company is now in the crosshairs because of its approach towards updating its own software.

Not for the first time, a bug has been found in the WebView component of Android 4.3 and below. This is the embeddable browser control powered by a version of the WebKit rendering engine used in Android apps.

Android 4.4 and 5.0, which use Blink rather than WebKit for their WebView, are unaffected. But by Google's own numbers, some 60 percent of Android users are using 4.3 or below. As such, this is a widespread, high-impact bug. The normal procedure would be to report the bug to Google, and for Google to develop a fix and publish it as part of Android Open Source Project release.

Alcademics reader and ice nerd Mike Palmer has come up with an easy if not space-efficient way of making clear ice cubes using a silicone tray and a cooler.

The short answer is: poke holes in the tray and set it on a riser at the bottom of an insulated cooler.

The long answer? Palmer wrote it himself below.

How to easily make perfect clear ice cubes, repeatably, from a tray

By Mike Palmer

Here’s an easy way to make clear ice cubes in your freezer using an ice cube tray, obviating the need to carve individual cubes out of a block of clear ice.

What you'll need: A small "Igloo" type cooler that fits in your freezer. A flexible, silicon ice cube tray with holes punched through the bottom. Something to make those holes, perhaps along with a piece of soft wood. A paper or Styrofoam cup. A rock. And of course, a freezer.

If TLTR, skip down to “How to do it.”

Background

I became obsessed with trying to make clear ice cubes at home (and later, clear ice spheres) after watching David Rees' How to Make an Ice Cube in his "Going Deep" series on the National Geographic TV channel. How hard could it be? (Ha!)

BTW, after finally succeeding at making clear ice cubes, I found that there are tangible benefits from using them in your drinks. (Even if drinking water.) In addition to lasting longer (because they’re pure ice and not ice/air), clear ice cubes also taste better because they’re pure ice. That is, they don’t have yucky tasting freezer air in them. Also, women like the aesthetics of clear ice and they notice—and like—the sound clear ice cubes make clinking in a glass. (Sure to please.) Freezer cubes don’t clink. They clunk. And now you’ll notice every time you hear a sound track in a movie or on TV.

In Theory

In David Rees’ TV program, he showed how clear ice forms in nature when a body of water slowly freezes from the top down with a substantial mass of warmer, unfrozen water underneath. (Alcademics readers knew this back in 2009. See http://www.alcademics.com/2009/11/another-clue-to-ice-clarity-slow-freezing-like-a-japanese-pond.html.)

And he suggested on his website that you could make a block of clear ice by kinda imitating nature, by letting a pan of water cool in a freezer. Although that’s not really imitating nature since the water in the tray freezes from the outside in on all sides.

So freezing a pan of water does not make a clear block of ice, as even Mr. Rees concedes. Air still gets trapped in the middle, so you have to cut the “outer edges of your ice block” to harvest clear ice.

And even if the block were totally clear, you would still have to carve away at it to make individual cubes. And then you’d have to smooth six edges of each cube. that’s very time consuming, not to mention dangerous, working with sharp edged instruments on slippery ice.

Rees’ suggestion for making clear ice works better if you use the slow freezing method, using a dorm style fridge set to 30 degrees, as Mr. Kevin Liu has suggested. http://sciencefare.org/2012/07/12/weird-science-ice-premium-ice-home/

But you still get air in your cubes that way. Here’s a photo of an ice cube made that way. Air is still trapped in the last part of the cube to freeze. In this experiment, with only the center trays filled, that’s the bottom middle.

(I hypothesize that air is sucked into the cube when the last bit of water expands as it freezes. It lifts the cube up and pulls a vacuum underneath. Interestingly, air gets trapped in different places in the different cubes depending on whether a cube has a sister cube (or cubes) next to it. You can tell what position in the tray the cube had come from based on the distribution of air trapped inside it. In one experiment, I filled the tray in a checkerboard fashion, so that no cube shared a side with another cube. Only their centers were cloudy.)

In Practice

What to do? I tried the slow freezing method, which was supposed to do the trick. But it didn’t.

Fortunately we have the Internet. After searching around on youtube and seeing people consistently recommend “directional freezing,” I found Camper English’s Index of Ice Experiments on Alcademics. Camper was years ahead of everyone else.

In Camper’s landmark experiment, he found that freezing water in molds in a cooler (that is, from the top down) gave clear ice.

Except that air got trapped in the very bottom of the ice.

Why was that? Although Camper’s technique imitated the directional freezing aspect of nature, there was at least one other aspect missing: the large thermal mass of liquid water underneath the ice.

So, building on Camper’s experiment, I placed a silicon ice cube tray on top of a large Styrofoam cup (as a stand) in a cooler. I filled the cup and I filled the cooler to the top of the ice cube tray. (That brought the water level halfway up the cooler. More on the optimal water level later.)

I put the cooler in a high-end prosumer freezer, which was set at 0 degrees F, the government’s recommendation for food safety. (I checked the temperature in two places simultaneously using two digital thermometers in different locations in the freezer.)

The result of this experiment was much better, but I still got a little bit of air trapped in the bottom of the cubes.

If you look at a close up Mr. Liu’s ice cube http://craftcocktailsathome.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_6874.jpg, his is not perfectly clear either.

I hypothesized that there was still one more aspect of nature missing from this experiment, and that was that, unlike a Japanese ice pond, the water in the ice cube tray could not interact with the unfrozen water below it. One needed holes in the bottom of the ice cube tray for trapped air to escape.

At the same time I came to this “Eureka!” moment, I found that a reader on the Alcademics blog had made the same observation. Furthermore, this idea was consistent with a suggestion on the blog of suspending a spherical ice ball mold upside down, above a pot of water, with the mold’s fill hole in the water to make a clear ice sphere. (Or similarly, the suggestion to put a spherical ice ball mold upside down (hole down) in a mug of water so that the water in the mold could interact with the unfrozen water below in the mug.)

So here’s what I did.

How to do it

I took an acid brush and used the tube end as an auger to bore holes in the bottom of a silicon ice cube tray. Any similar tube will work. A 9mm shell casing would probably work too. (A .38 caliber casing is too large but works well on spherical ice molds.)

I got my trays from Amazon, if you look closely at the photos of the ice cubes on the Amazon product page, you can see air trapped inside them.

I used a Dremel tool with a cone-shaped cutter to grind a knife edge on the end of the tube. I put the ice cube tray on a piece of soft wood (to act as backing for the work) and pushed the tube into the bottom of the tray while rotating the tube. (If you use the end of an acid brush, you need to rotate it CCW so that the tube doesn’t unwind and open. If you use a shell casing, you can hammer on the casing (on the soft wood) to punch your holes through.)

Take a Styrofoam cup and cut it down to about an inch as a stand for the ice cube tray. (I started with a full size Styrofoam cup, but you’re just wasting water if you fill the cooler half full of water. And by using a one inch cup, the tray is lower in the cooler, resulting in better directional freezing.)

Put’s a rock in the cup to weigh down the cup. Else, the stand floats off the bottom of the cooler.

Put the tray in the cup that had the rock in it and filled the cooler with water to the top of the tray.

You might want to jiggle the tray a bit after you put it in the freezer, to knock air bubbles out that might be trapped underneath the tray.

Wait about 18 hours. Timing is somewhat critical. You want to catch the freezing process just as ice has formed below the tray. If you wait too long, all the water below the tray will have frozen and you might get air in your cubes. Remember, in the Japanese pond, there is always unfrozen water below the clear ice.

After the water under the tray has frozen, take the cooler out of the freezer, place it upside down in a sink and set a timer for about 10 to 20 minutes in case you forget to baby sit it. In about 10 or 20 minutes, you will hear a thunk as the ice block releases from inside the cooler. If you timed it right, a lot of water will eventually drain out of the cooler. (A cooler with the drain plug might be interesting. We could use compressed air to blow the ice block out.)

You will be greeted by a strange formation of ice crystals and a cavern of sorts from where unfrozen water drained. (Apparently the cooler isn’t as well insulated on its bottom as we would like, since ice forms there. Since cold air descends, shouldn’t coolers be twice as thick on their bottoms as they are on their sides? Maybe we should put a cooler in a cooler?)

Break the clumped ice away from the ice cube tray, push the cubes out of the tray from behind, and viola! Perfect, clear ice cubes.

Allow your cubes to temper for one minute before using them in your drinks to avoid cracking. 

Now you’re ready to do it all over again and make another batch!

High Strangeness

When I first tried these experiments, I started with the minimal amount of water, not knowing what the right amount of water underneath the tray should be.

I made a spacer that was only a half inch high.

When I did that, something strange happened. I got an extrusion of cloudy ice during the freezing process!

It has always been a corner cube that extrudes in all my runs. All the other cubes are clear. That’s gotta be telling me something.

So then I went the other way, putting more water in the mix by using a plastic beverage cup as a stand for the ice cube tray. I let the water freeze almost completely and didn’t get any extrusions. Let’s hear your thoughts about what’s causing the extrusions.

You can see how the water has frozen at the bottom of the cooler, again demonstrating that the bottom of the cooler is not as insulated as it should be. In any event, there’s enough clear ice below the tray to give us clear ice cubes. (Notice some air bubbles just below the tray.)

Ever being an engineer, I wondered what the “optimal” (minimal) amount of water was for this process. I kept shortening the cup until I got to one inch. Since I knew a half inch was too little, it seems that one inch is optimal. One inch seems to be about the same distance in the photo above too.

I can now make perfect clear ice cubes repeatably in less than 24 hours without a lot of waste.

----

Thanks Mike! 

Read about all the ice experients on Alcademics by following this link. 

Sasha Frere-Jones, the veteran music critic who has worked for The New Yorker for the past decade, is leaving the magazine to serve as executive editor for Genius, the startup formerly known as Rap Genius. The site was founded by three Yale graduates in order to explain hip-hop lyrics to people who could not understand them. Genius has raised $56.8 million since launching in 2009.

The New York Times says Frere-Jones will focus on "annotations of music lyrics." Genius could use the help.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to see familiar names from an atrophying field like print media switch over to the startup sector. Tech is the only industry that feels like it will still be able to get funding in the next five years, regardless of whether founders have figured out how to make money. (Print lost the privilege of operating without profit when it failed to see the Internet coming.)

To pick one recent example: eBay founder Pierre Omidyar nabbed a number of investigative reporters, including Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, as anchor tenants for First Look Media. It wasn't a culture fit, as they say in Silicon Valley, for Taibbi. But half the tech bloggers in the Bay Area seem one swanky party away from switching sides.

Sure, it's a little eye-popping that someone from the most respected magazine in the country is joining the most clownish startup in the tech boom. The list of offensive antics from its cofounders could fill their Williamsburg penthouse. Music obsessives, in particular, have great disdain for the idea of whitesplaining rap lyrics, even if many prominent music critics are also (surprise) white men. Hip hop, however, was just a stepping stone for the folks at Genius. They have moved onto annotating everything they can, even if they had to do some dirty SEO to get there.

In time, we'll probably come to view moving from print media to a startup with the same shrug as bloggers moving to magazines or vice versa. The more troubling trend behind Frere-Jones' decision is that Rap Genius is now the kind of news organization that gets funded. According to the New York Times:

Genius’s expansion marks the latest merger of the tech and media worlds, and helps to fulfill a prediction made by one of the company’s funders, Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, that the definition of journalism might broaden to include jobs outside of traditional writing and editing.

It's a prediction that Andreessen helped finance. His firm, Andreessen Horowitz, participated in the $40 million round that Rap Genius raised in last July and the $15 million round it raised in October, 2012.

Venture capitalists have traditionally grimaced at investing in "content" (i.e. ideas expressed in words and images). But with institutions like Conde Nast, which owns The New Yorker, laying off 10 percent of its workforce, and the ouroboros of newspapers and blogs, it starts to look like an opportunity. All those places depend on traffic from social media pipelines like Facebook, another Andreessen Horowitz investment. Suddenly those pipeline investors are financing the media-tech hybrids they think will succeed within the system they helped create.

The New York Times, which broke the news about Frere-Jones, did not mention how much money Genius has made off its 40 million monthly unique visitors. Business Insider, which broke the news of Genius' new $40 million funding round, didn't mention money either. It's nice to be a startup, for now.

Last week, the imageboard site 8chan.co was brought offline for a sustained period of over five days due to a prolonged DDoS attack. On Monday, it returned only to go back offline for a much different reason: its domain had been seized.

Site founder Fredrick Brennan posted an e-mail on Monday that he says came from the site's Bahamas-based registrar, Internet.bs. The note explained that the domain 8chan.co had been put "on hold" due to "child abuse" content appearing on the site.

This followed a swell of complaint e-mails sent over the weekend to Cloudflare, the "pass-through" content delivery network that had been operating 8chan's servers. Some users were upset over content posted on 8chan by its imageboard users and directed their complaints to Cloudflare. "Please take appropriate measures to stop your customer from abusing your services and enabling illegal content," one complainant wrote after posting links to 11 8chan boards that contained underage "girls and boys shown in sexual poses."

It seems like just yesterday that we were posting weekly updates about the new playable songs available for download in the Rock Band store. In actuality, it's been about 21 months since Harmonix stopped its regular DLC updates in April 2013 and over four years since the last retail Rock Band game (though the brand has lived on in titles like the downloadable Rock Band Blitz).

Everything old is new again this week, though, with the surprise announcement that three new Rock Band tracks will be available for download starting Tuesday. The new songs you'll be able to download for $2 each are:

• Avenged Sevenfold—"Shepherd of Fire"
• Arctic Monkeys—"R U Mine?"
• Foo Fighters—"Something from Nothing"

Why add new songs to the 3,500 track Rock Band library so suddenly, after such a long break? "We had an exciting opportunity to add new content to the already-massive Rock Band library with a song from Arctic Monkeys—a band that’s never been in a Rock Band title before!—as well as new music from fan favorites Avenged Sevenfold and Foo Fighters," Harmonix spokesman Nick Chester told Ars in an e-mail. "We couldn’t pass it up. Also, we wanted to see if we could still do it. Turns out we can. It’s sort of like riding a bike."