Ryan Mustard

It bills itself as a "temporary respite from the SXSW masses." [ more › ]

Aamer Rahman talks about Reverse Racism

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Tiffany Bridge, on Dropbox’s new terms of service:

Allow me to summarize what it means when a company wants to handle all disputes in arbitration:

No matter what they do (delete your data, privacy breach, overcharging, whatever), you don’t get to sue. Instead, THEY get to choose the arbitrator according to whatever criteria they want, and thus any dispute is decided by someone they’re paying.

Also, you can’t join a class-action suit against them. Which sounds like no big deal, but when a company takes advantage of a bunch of people all in the same small way (incorrectly assessing a service charge, for example), class action is how companies are made to clean up their act en masse, instead of waiting for thousands of people to call them up and demand their $20 back or whatever.

I’m not a lawyer, but it seems clear to me that opting out is in your best interests. I did.

Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica and A New Kind of Science fame) says the upcoming Wolfram Language is his company's "most important technology project yet".

We call it the Wolfram Language because it is a language. But it's a new and different kind of language. It's a general-purpose knowledge-based language. That covers all forms of computing, in a new way.

There are plenty of existing general-purpose computer languages. But their vision is very different -- and in a sense much more modest -- than the Wolfram Language. They concentrate on managing the structure of programs, keeping the language itself small in scope, and relying on a web of external libraries for additional functionality. In the Wolfram Language my concept from the very beginning has been to create a single tightly integrated system in which as much as possible is included right in the language itself.

The demo video is a little mind-melting in parts:

Not sure if this will take off or not, but the idea behind it all is worth exploring.

Tags: programming   Stephen Wolfram   Wolfram Language

Texas Athletics enters a new era of drunkenness.

According to multiple sources, Texas will begin selling beer tonight at the Lady Longhorns basketball game. Expect rioting later tonight at Whole Foods and a Subaru Outback wrapped around a telephone pole on Red River.  Beer sales will also commence at UT Men's Basketball, Baseball and Softball games and, eventually, if all goes according to plan, in the Fall at UT Football games.

While most sensible binge drinkers welcome the opportunity to quaff overpriced mediocre beer at our favorite sporting events, there are some pros and cons to consider...

Pros

Texas fans will no longer pour into the alumni center at halftime for their alcohol fix and, enticed by air conditioning, couches and available televisions, fail to return to the game.  This will severely limit the networking opportunities for mortgage broker golf pricks wearing concho belts.  A win for society.

Beer sales aid drunkenness and drunkenness aids fan boisterousness.  Science, there.  Finally, our Softball diamond can become the sort of vicious road environment we've long fantasized about - blocky girls on the opposing team are about to enter a criticism session the likes of which were last seen during Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Texas Athletics will make more money!  That's the reason we follow these teams.  So that we can drive revenue maximization for an enterprise that takes us for granted.

Foul balls and errant passes now have a reasonable chance of hitting carelessly clutched beers, baptizing the unwary drinker in an explosion of foam and hops.  This is immensely visually satisfying and additional points are earned if it's one of the ancient frowning folded arms types who populate the first four rows of the Erwin Center.   NOW I'M WET AND BEER STINKY AND I'M SCOWLING EVEN MORE.  ERRRR.

Cons

More alcohol means more alcohol-related incidents, ranging from Come At Me Bro fights, DUI checkpoints with handy ATM machines, to inexplicably urinating oneself during a dramatic goal line stand.  Does this really belong in the cons?

More alcohol means a 29% increase in the guy who sits next to you decrying every play call, remarking that David Ash just isn't a natural winner and excoriating the defense for allowing a 6 yard completion on 3rd and 14.  However, more alcohol means that this fan is 21% more likely to get liver punched.  Life is about trade-offs.

Some members of the faculty will issue a statement decrying the sale of alcohol and, if it must be sold, bemoaning our failure to sell organically sustainable, minority-owned, craft, saliva-based betel nut beers obtained through fair trade with proud indigenous peoples.  I'm looking at you, McCombs School Of Business Management Information Systems Department.

UT Athletics will ruthlessly exterminate game-day bootlegging - the natural right of all young Texans seeking inebriation and eventual bouncy-bouncy with their dates.  Students and young alumni will be cavity searched for alcohol and Jim Beam sniffing dogs will attack the flask in your Redwings like it's a squirrel bathed in gumbo.  For maximal hygiene during this cavity archaeology, bring your own speculum covers. Conveniently sold with a Longhorn logo for a reasonable $18.

The beer sold probably won't be Sam Adams, Pliny The Elder and Sierra Nevada.  I'm guessing Coors Light.  Or whoever else writes us the biggest check.  Still, $2 an ounce for mainstream beer seems reasonable.  With four tickets, a Foundation contribution, four beers, parking and a few hot dogs and nachos, a middle class family can enjoy a Texas Longhorns football game from the 5 yard line upper deck against a unappealing Big 12 opponent for the bargain price of $750!  That's Longhorn-tainment!

Poll

Should Texas sell beer at sporting events?

"Clear lines. Meat parts. Can't lose." [ more › ]

Their base plan is $8 a month for access to the antenna that catches broadcasts and 20 hours of digital DVR storage; there's also a premium tier for $12 a month, which includes 60 hours of DVR space. [ more › ]

We’d like to give a quick status on the new Premium plans and thank you all for the support.  It’s been a little over a week since we introduced the new paid accounts and the support from our community has been terrific.  That said, we still have a ways to go to meet our goals and are working diligently to address as much of your input as possible.

Here are answers to many of the frequent questions that we’ve been receiving over the past week.

Q: Why no Paypal?

A: We just released Paypal payments. You can now use either secure credit card payments through Stripe, or checkout using Paypal.

Q: Why didn’t you do ads?

A: As we mentioned in our previous posts, we’re heavily committed to the open web and feel that ads put our neutrality in jeopardy.  We haven’t completely ruled out future advertising for non-premium accounts, but we will do everything possible to avoid that decision.

Q: What happens when my grace period or trial expires and I’m over the free feed limit?

A: If you’re over the limit and your trial is expired, then your feeds will stop updating. We won’t ever lock you out of The Old Reader, and you’ll always be able to see what your friends are sharing, and you’ll always be able to export your subscriptions to OPML.

Q: Does “6 months of post storage” extend to shared items and comments?

A: We keep shared items and comments forever. Those are never removed. The only posts that will ever be removed are the read and unread posts that you haven’t shared, liked, or starred.

Q: If feed refreshes are shared, how do the tiered feed refresh speeds work?

A: We do our best to store and fetch only unique feeds, so we fetch new posts for a feed once, and deliver the new posts for each user who is subscribed to that feed.

So, if one of the users who is subscribed to that feed decides to become a premium user, all of the feeds that user is subscribed to will begin updating faster. Any free users subscribed to the same feeds will get the faster refresh time as well.

Q: What is the Instapaper and Readability integration?

A: Instapaper and Readability integration is setup, so that if you go into settings and authorize those services, any time you Star a post, it will be shared to to those services. You don’t need to click “Sent to” and be redirected off to the other site. Just click Star and it all happens in the background.

Q: Where’s the bookmarklet?

A: The bookmarklet is a high priority feature for us. We think it’s a very valuable feature to be able to take any article you come across and put it into The Old Reader for later reading. It’s a bit of a big change, since now we don’t have the concept of a post without a feed, but we’re on it and it will be available soon.

Thanks for using The Old Reader!

Facebook is buying the hugely popular WhatsApp for $16 billion according to a filing with the SEC. The purchase, $4 billion in cash plus $12 billion in Facebook shares and potential for an additional $3 billion in employee stock payouts, will see WhatsApp founder Jan Koum joining Facebook's board of directors.

WhatsApp Messenger is a hugely popular cross-platform messaging app that allows users to chat with individuals or groups, as well as sending files and pictures back and forth.

Back in December, the service bragged that it had 400 million active users, with 100 million of those added in the last four months of 2013. Back in April of 2013, it was rumored that Google was close to acquiring the company for $1 billion -- something WhatsApp denied. Today's sale price reflects the company's tremendous growth over the last several months.

According to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg:

WhatsApp will complement our existing chat and messaging services to provide new tools for our community. Facebook Messenger is widely used for chatting with your Facebook friends, and WhatsApp for communicating with all of your contacts and small groups of people. Since WhatsApp and Messenger serve such different and important uses, we will continue investing in both and making them each great products for everyone.

The service is one of many messaging services available on iOS and other mobile platforms, including Apple's own iMessage service integrated into iOS and OS X. Such services have become increasingly popular as users seek to avoid mobile carriers' SMS charges and expand their conversations to include devices not directly connected to cellular service. WhatsApp says that the Facebook and WhatsApp messaging apps will remain standalone for the foreseeable future, and WhatsApp will remain autonomous, operating independently of Facebook.

The company's app is currently the 35th most popular on the App Store. Facebook says WhatsApp's messaging volume is "approaching the entire global telecom SMS volume", roughly 7 trillion message a year. WhatsApp Messenger is a free download on the App Store. [Direct Link]

In April 2012, Facebook purchased Instagram for $1 billion.

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So I’m hooked on Threes, this brand new iOS game where you combine pairs of tiles to make bigger numbered tiles and then combine those with their pairs and keep going until the board fills up with tiles and you have no moves left.

It sounds simple — and it is — but the games developers spent an entire year trying variations on the artwork and gameplay before finally settling on this simplified version that takes just a minute to learn.

I’m feeling pretty happy right now because this morning I somehow managed to get a 384 tile, and thus catapulted into a new high score of 9,864. But that’s apparently small peanuts… check out Eric Pramono’s strategy for how he gets 768 tiles.

✚

This is awesome!

(via Incredible new video of Felix Baumgartner’s space jump)

Jon Bois attempted to create the most lopsided game ever in Madden NFL on his Xbox. He beefed up the players on one team (7'0", 440 lbs, good at everything) and put a bunch of scrubs on the other team (5'0", 160 lbs, bad at everything). He started playing and was on pace to score more than 1500 points when...

With just under two minutes left in the first quarter, I was winning 366 to zero. I realized that I was on pace to score 1,500 points in a single game. I had never conceived of such a high score. I'd never even heard anyone talk idly about such a thing. There was absolutely nothing the Broncos could do to slow down my pace. I could score just as surely as someone can point and click. It was great. I wanted to ruin Madden in a way I never had before, and I was doing it.

And then it happened. Before I tell you what happened next, I want to lay out a couple of things: first, I made no actual hacks to this game. I didn't have some special jailbroken Xbox, nor a special copy of Madden, nor anything like that. I bought my Xbox at Target and bought my copy of Madden off Amazon, and that's that. Second, I stake whatever journalistic integrity I have upon the statement that I didn't Photoshop any of this, and that it happened just as I say it did.

This is LOL funny in several places...particularly the GIFs. (via @delfuego)

Tags: football   Jon Bois   sports   video games

Count me in for this new Kickstarter project from Sam Agboola:

To make photo printing fun — for the first time by our reckoning — we’ve designed a photo finishing system ready for the 21st century. Museum quality (Giclée) printers, German 220 gram photo paper from sustainable sources, laser cutters, and robots with carbon fiber arms will allow Flag to deliver prints, for free, that are better than any you can pay for today. We want to turn your memories into mementos you can be proud of.

Our secret to making photo printing free? An advertisement on the back of each print. It will always be tasteful, and we are steadfast in our commitment to never sell or share your personal information with advertisers.

Genius if they can pull it off.

In a thread about the newly visible supernova in the M82 galaxy, MetaFilter user Ivan Fyodorovich offered up this plain-English explanation of what happens when a star dies and goes supernova. It's a great read.

It will take it just 6 months to burn up its oxygen. Again, when there's not enough oxygen being fused to generate energy to balance the pressure of gravitational contraction, the star begins to shrink, almost doubling the temperature, tripling the density, and causing the silicon (which was produced by the oxygen fusion) to begin fusing, in its own complicated sequence involving the alpha process, with the end result of nickel-56 (which radioactively decays into cobalt-56 and iron-56). This, as before, balances against the gravitational pressure and returns the star to equilibrium.

And now it will take merely 1 day to burn up its silicon. Finally, when there's not enough silicon being fused to generate energy to balance the pressure of gravitational contraction, the star begins to shrink.

This time, however, the core of the star is mostly nickel and iron, and they cannot ordinarily be fused into heavier elements, so as the star shrinks and the temperature and density increase, there is no nuclear fusion ignition of the nickel and iron to counteract the contraction. Here the limit of pressure and density is the electron degeneracy pressure, which is the resistance of electrons being forced to occupy the same energy states, which they can't.

(via @mathowie)

Tags: astronomy   physics   science

#TBT

Mark Ames, reporting for Pando Daily:

In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple’s Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google’s Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators. On February 27, 2005, Bill Campbell, a member of Apple’s board of directors and senior advisor to Google, emailed Jobs to confirm that Eric Schmidt “got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple.”

Later that year, Schmidt instructed his Sr VP for Business Operation Shona Brown to keep the pact a secret and only share information “verbally, since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?”

Amazing story.

Pixelmator has updated its image editing software to version 3.1, adding full support for the new Mac Pro, including 16-bit per channel images, full GPU support, and optimizations for the multi-core processors in the new machine.

The app now uses both Mac Pro GPU's simultaneously for composition rendering and uses lots of background computing to speed up zoom and other tasks, with the company claiming that "image editing is now completely seamless, and even with large and complex compositions you will experience profoundly faster and more responsive performance."

"We are extremely excited for professionals to experience the power and speed of Pixelmator 3.1 Marble on their new Mac Pros," said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team. "Harnessing the power of the Mac Pro’s dual-GPU architecture, we’re now able to support 16-bit per channel images for the first time and push the limits of Pixelmator performance like never before."

Pixelmator has also gained a new Order Prints feature that allows users to order postcards, notecards, gallery frames, or posters right in the app. The app received its last significant upgrade back in October when it gained a new image editing engine.

Pixelmator 3.1 is a free upgrade for existing users, while new users can download the app from the Mac App Store for $29.99. [Direct Link]

Sheryl Canter extensively researched the best way to season a cast iron pan and here is what she recommends you do. (Because science.)

I've read dozens of Web pages on how to season cast iron, and there is no consensus in the advice. Some say vegetable oils leave a sticky surface and to only use lard. Some say animal fat gives a surface that is too soft and to only use vegetable oils. Some say corn oil is the only fat to use, or Crisco, or olive oil. Some recommend bacon drippings since lard is no longer readily available. Some say you must use a saturated fat -- that is, a fat that is solid at room temperature, whether it's animal or vegetable (palm oil, coconut oil, Crisco, lard). Some say never use butter. Some say butter is fine. Some swear by Pam (spray-on canola oil with additives). Some say the additives in Pam leave a residue at high temperatures and pure canola oil is best. Some say it doesn't matter what oil you use.

They are all wrong. It does matter what oil you use, and the oil that gives the best results is not in this list. So what is it? Here are some hints: What oil do artists mix with pigment for a high quality oil paint that dries hard and glassy on the canvas? What oil is commonly used by woodturners to give their sculptures a protective, soft-sheen finish? It's the same oil. Now what is the food-grade equivalent of this oil?

The oil used by artists and woodturners is linseed oil. The food-grade equivalent is called flaxseed oil. This oil is ideal for seasoning cast iron for the same reason it's an ideal base for oil paint and wood finishes. It's a "drying oil", which means it can transform into a hard, tough film. This doesn't happen through "drying" in the sense of losing moisture through evaporation. The term is actually a misnomer. The transformation is through a chemical process called "polymerization".

Those before and after photos are hard to argue with. (via @akuban)

Update: Canter wrote a bit more about seasoning and added an extra step to the process. (via @_Atticus)

Tags: science   Sheryl Canter

Kathryn Schulz, writing for Vulture:

Some forms of punctuation seem less marked out for fame than others; if anyone knows of a noteworthy comma, I’d love to hear about it. But what follows is a — well, what follows is a colon, which sets off a list, which contains the most extraordinary examples I could find of the most humble elements of prose:

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What do you think you get if you add 1+2+3+4+5+... all the way on up to infinity? Probably a massively huge number, right? Nope. You get a small negative number:

This is, by a wide margin, the most noodle-bending counterintuitive thing I have ever seen. Mathematician Leonard Euler actually proved this result in 1735, but the result was only made rigorous later and now physicists have been seeing this result actually show up in nature. Amazing. (thx, chris)

Update: Of course (of course!) the actual truth seems more complicated, hinging on what "sum" means mathematically, etc. (via @cenedella)

Update: As usual, Phil Plait sorts things out on this complicated situation. (via @theory)

Tags: Leonard Euler   mathematics   video

Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition, the sequel to the original Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition for iOS released in late 2012, can now be downloaded from the App Store.

The game, which has been made available thanks to a collaboration between Beamdog, and Atari, is a remake of Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn and the following expansion packs: Throne of Bhaal, Fist of the Fallen, Unbound, A Shadow's Life, In Defense of the Wild, The Black Pits II: Gladiators of Thay, and Gallery of Heroes II.

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster… When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you…"

Kidnapped. Imprisoned. Tortured. The wizard Irenicus holds you captive in his stronghold, attempting to strip you of the powers that are your birthright.

Can you resist the evil within you, forge a legend of heroic proportions, and ultimately destroy the dark essence that haunts your dreams? Or will you embrace your monstrous nature, carve a swath of destruction across the realms, and ascend to godhood as the new Lord of Murder?

As with the original Baldur's Gate for iOS, Baldur's Gate II includes multiplayer functionality, remastered artwork, and interface improvements. Baldur's Gate II has also been available from the Mac App Store since November.

Baldur's Gate II can be downloaded from the App Store for $14.99. [Direct Link]

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