Milosz Tanski

8.5 million geolocated tweets.

Above: a map created by James Cheshire, Ed Manley, and John Barratt, who collected 8.5 million geo-located tweets between January 2010 and February 2013.

Fast Company Design reports: "To build the image itself, they placed a point every 50 meters across the city. Tweets falling in close proximity were translated into a grid that you see here."

Among the revelations: Midtown is massively multilingual, "like a someone spilled a jar of confetti across the island."

More: Infographic: The Languages Of New York, Mapped By Tweets

A TSA screener at JFK pepper-sprayed five of his colleagues at Terminal 2 on Tuesday, according to the New York Post. The screener, Chris Yves Dabel, found a pepper-spray cannister on the floor and believed it was a laser-pointer, so (for some reason), he aimed it at five other screeners and pressed the trigger. The six were sent to Jamaica Hospital.

The screener sprayed five other TSA agents around him, sending all six to Jamaica Hospital and halting security checks at Kennedy for at least 15 minutes, police said.

No passengers reported injuries. Dabel refused medical attention.

TSA officials scrambled to keep the embarrassing incident under wraps yesterday — until The Post began inquiring about it, a source said.

Oops, TSA guy goes spray-zy! [NY Post/Josh Margolin]

(via Digg)

(Image: Pepper Spray Cop - White background, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from donkeyhotey's photostream)

Gotcha! Keck Institute for Space Studies

Aviation Week is carrying the news that NASA's FY2014 budget will include a $100 million line item to start planning a robotic mission to snatch an asteroid and relocate it to near the Moon, where it could be studied up-close by NASA—and possibly even visited by astronauts (hat-tip to the Houston Chronicle's SciGuy blog for the news).

The idea is based on a report by the Keck Institute for Space Studies, which outlines an entire robotic mission to locate and retrieve an NEA—a Near Earth Asteroid—of about 500,000kg in mass and a diameter of about 7 meters. Such an asteroid would be a C-type or carbonaceous asteroid, and would have the consistency of "a dried mudball." The asteroid would be hauled back via a robotic probe and positioned in an orbit above the far side of the Moon at the second Earth-Moon Lagrange Point, where the vagaries of gravity and inertia would keep the asteroid in a roughly consistent location. Once positioned there, the asteroid would—at least in theory—be within the range of a manned visit.

To go out and grab the asteroid in the first place, the report recommends a probe weighing about 18,000 kg, which could be lofted into space using an existing launch vehicle (such as an Atlas V). Shifting 500,000 kg of mass with conventional rockets would require a tremendous amount of propellant to be carried along with the probe so, rather than chemical rockets, the probe would be equipped with a "~40-kW solar electric propulsion system with a specific impulse of 3,000 s."

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It's September 23, 1996. It's a Monday. The Macarena is pumping out of the office radio, mid-way through its 14 week run at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, doing little to improve the usual Monday gloom.

Easing yourself into the week, you idly thumb through a magazine, and read about Windows NT 4.0, released just a couple of months previous. You wonder to yourself whether Microsoft's hot new operating system might finally be worth using.

Then it's down to work. Microsoft can keep its fancy GUIs and graphical server operating systems. NetWare 3.12 is where it's at: bulletproof file and print sharing. The server, named INTEL after its process, needs an update, so you install it and reboot. It comes up fine, so you get on with the rest of your day.

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Your Raspberry Pi is great, but it needs more DOS. Patrick Aalto

For the one million of you who have purchased a Raspberry Pi system since it launched a year ago, Geek.com has another thing you can add to the list of things it does: programmer Patrick Aalto has put together an emulator, called rpix86, that can run code written for Intel processors.

The Pi's ARM CPU runs at 700MHz, but an emulated x86 processor isn't going to be nearly that fast: specifically, rpix86 emulates an Intel 80486 running at roughly 20Mhz with 640KB of real memory, 4MB of expanded memory, and 16MB of extended memory; Super VGA graphics supporting up to a 640×480 resolution and 256 colors; a SoundBlaster 2.0 sound card; and keyboard and two-button mouse support.

The emulator is intended primarily as a vehicle to run old DOS games that no longer run on modern PCs (at least without the aid of a separate emulator like DOSBox or Boxer), and it has a few limitations that keep it from performing more complex tasks. It supports some protected mode features but lacks support for virtual memory necessary to run versions of Windows newer than 3.0—virtual memory support would "seriously slow down the emulation, which is pretty slow even as it is." Like a real MS-DOS PC, rpix86 also lacks support for long filenames (the traditional 8.3 file naming scheme applies). Aalto has made a number of game-specific fixes since the emulator's first version, but don't expect it to run much more than (relatively) simply DOS games and applications.

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Cable companies are universally regarded as only slightly more popular than evil dictators, and a little less fashionable than certain strains of STDs. How do you fix something like that? Honesty! We're awful; we're unstoppable; you'll hate us; deal with it. That's something you could respect (and which would be applicable basically everywhere in the world but east Asia). Hell, I'd probably switch to this company if it were real. [YouTube] More »

There are a lot of good reasons to make banana bread: You have a pile of sad bananas on top of your fridge that have reached their life’s expectancy. You like things that are unquestionably delicious. It’s raining and you need something toasty and cake-like to go with your coffee. You’re into recipes you can make with one bowl, and feed a dozen. You’re going to be wildly busy this fall and are hoping to pack your freezer with all sorts of wonders that that can be warmed up whenever the craving strikes, even if you’re not around to enjoy them.

There are very few reasons, however, to reinvent banana bread, even when one’s original recipe is just shy of six years old, an eternity in blog years. I mean, is there anything new to add to banana bread? Even if there were, should banana bread be mussed with? The answers are, of course, no but due to a confluence of events — and yes, 24-hours-from-fruit-flies bananas were one of them; freezer-packing was another — I found myself making an updated banana bread last week and it was so lovely that it deserves a new mention.

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