Dan Jones

"A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something."

Question: How do you convince the Japanese to work at McDonald’s? Answer: You hire Studio Colorido to make an anime short about how much fun working there can be.

Alright, yes, McDonald’s employment may not be glamorous, or exciting, and maybe people will yell at you because they didn’t want pickles in their Big Mac (and even though they didn’t tell you you should just know, goddamnit). But hey, maybe this little bit of admittedly gorgeous animation, featuring voice acting from several members of AKB48, will convince young people that a job at McDonald’s is a good place to start.

See more on That’s Nerdalicious…

TRITON, the human gills design concept I showed you dudes here 2 years ago (and which many of you had mucho to say about in our comments section) is running a crowdfunding campaign to actually produce the equpiment. TRITONs. Mouthpieces with a coupla bicycle handlebars jutting out from them that creator Jeabyun Yeon says can filter out water molecules but absorb and store oxygen. So you can breathe underwater.

Is this real life? Is it April 1? Is Jeabyun Yeon full of sherbet?

Well. I don't know him, and I haven't tried a TRITON myself, but if you're considering dropping $299 to back the breathe-like-a-fishy IndieGoGo campaign, please focus in on the word "fishy." That's how it all sounds to me and my credit card.

Here's the rundown on the science behind TRITON. In technical terms, the apparatus is a "re-breather with artificial gills." The gills are made out of Microporous Hollow Fiber, a material whose threads Yeon and his partners say are smaller than water molecules, and so are able to invite oxygen in but slam the You shall not pass! staff down on H2O. A microprocessor then extracts and stores incoming oxygen for human lung use.

According to Yeon, TRITON's microprocessor is "very powerful" and "modified," and works in conjunction with a lithium-ion battery that is also "powerful" and "modified" to compress oxygen and send the extractions to a storage tank. Swimmers with a TRITON need only bite gently on its mouthpiece and breathe normally to use.

The re-breather does have some limitations that make its existence sound slightly more plausible. One, TRITONs have a maximum usage depth of 15', so no one looking to explore the depths of the ocean can swap out their 50-pound SCUBA tank and reg for a set of handheld gills just yet. TRITON also has a battery life of about 45 minutes when fully charged. If you go deeper than 15', the device will start to vibrate and flash LED lamps. It will also, uh, get harder to breathe. The same vibrations will kick up when the battery is running low, and will continue until you turn the TRITON off.

Note: the second video above shows a guy test snorkeling a TRITON prototype. It is 1:56 long. Normally, it would be a hot 2-minute death for me to have to watch a video of a guy doing lazy laps in a swimming pool for 1:56. Here though, I was like, Dude, this thing either really works, or this guy has mutant lungs, and I was stoked to check it out. But the filming isn't continuous. Twice they show him "breathing" with the TRITON for less than 30 seconds at a time before cutting away to another clip. The last segment the camera stays on him for 40 seconds.

According to the Internet, the average person can hold his or her breath for 2 minutes, and some dude from Brazil once did it for over 20 minutes. So even though there are bubbles and crap coming out of video guy's TRITON gill grills, my skepticism remains firmly intact.

Muchas danke to Sandy D. for the Dude Product Tip.

New comic on Webtoons! http://www.webtoons.com/en/slice-of-life/lunarbaboon/ep-63-dress-up/viewer?title_no=523&episode_no=63

The political landscape, in both the United States and Brazil, is pretty divisive right now. As such, there is endless stream of content for people whom support one party or the other. This comic is for the everyone in between.

See more: Red vs. Blue

As someone who has always preferred manga over western comics, I really appreciate this image. That said, the DC Universe should be thankful of two things. One, that Saitama is good guy. And two, that they don't have to worry thing number one since there is no Saitama on Earth-0. Man, isn't One-Punch Man the best?



See more: Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice…

I used to have lots of friends, but now I have none and this is why: they all turned out to be synths.



See more: How to Find Out if Your Friend is a Synth

Books: The Final Frontier Keep your Star Trek books and DVDs organized in Federation-approved style! $134.99

GitHub has improved their code reviewing tools:

Effective code review catches bugs before they’re deployed, improves code consistency, and helps educate new developers. We’re adding new features to make code review on GitHub faster and more flexible.

A few include a handy timeline indicator showing what you might’ve missed after reviewing a pull request, and a way to filter filters in a pull request by type (e.g. maybe you just want to look at the CSS files).

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

More code review tools (on GitHub) is a post from CSS-Tricks

Teach a fish to hunt men, though, and you’re totally boned.

Nicky Case built a tool for simulating systems with emoji. You populate your world with things (represented by emoji), add a few rules about how those things interact, and boom, you've got yourself a little world. The default simulation is of a forest fire, but others have made simulations of predator/prey cycles, animal skin patterns, and epidemics. Try making your own here.

Tags: emoji   Nicky Case

I find this comic very relatable. I also want to mention that this comic was done by Bryan Free and it is the very first installment of Family Land Comic. If you enjoyed it, make sure to keep an eye out on his site as it updates.



See more: Pre and Post Gaming

If you're getting a lot of emails and you're tired of writing replies, Google's Inbox service has a feature that suggests 3 short replies. It was first added to the Inbox mobile apps and now it's available in the desktop site. Apparently, 10% of all the replies on mobile already use Smart Reply.

Smart Reply uses machine learning to figure out if a short reply is appropriate and then predicts likely responses. "The Smart Reply System is built on a pair of recurrent neural networks, one used to encode the incoming email and one to predict possible responses. The encoding network consumes the words of the incoming email one at a time, and produces a vector (a list of numbers). The second network starts from this thought vector and synthesizes a grammatically correct reply one word at a time, like it's typing it out. Amazingly, the detailed operation of each network is entirely learned, just by training the model to predict likely responses."

{ Thanks, Jonah Langlieb. }