Tadeu

planning > calculating > failing

Some people can "see" their own hands waving in front of their faces while in total darkness. It shouldn't be possible, but a quirk of their senses allows these people to perceive movement without using their eyes.

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eatingwordswithkittywitch:

kingjaffejoffer:

Dad made his son a hand with a 3D printer for $10 instead of paying tens of thousands for a prosthetic.

The way the boy smiles when he says “I’m like a cyborg.” just melted my heart. People are printing robotic hands. It’s the future. We live in sci-fi.

Maybe your boss (or spouse?) will want you to wear it:

And then there’s the lie-detector feature. “Optionally,” the filing muses, “the electronic skin tattoo can further include a galvanic skin response detector to detect skin resistance of a user. It is contemplated that a user that may be nervous or engaging in speaking falsehoods may exhibit different galvanic skin response than a more confident, truth telling individual.”

There is more information here.  The pointer is from Charles C. Mann.

Artist Marion, also known as Galaxyspeaking, does a puckish genderflip of Peter Pan, reimagining the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up as a girl named Petra, who traipses through Neverland with her crew of Lost Girls and her male fairy companion, Tinkerbell.

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How to make: Origami Phoenix

Não acreditoooooo… onde ele achou um monitor de tubo??? =O

Floppy disk and son

DriveThru* is now doing POD card games. $0.08/card standard finish ($4.80 cost for a 60-card deck); four-color, full-bleed printing; US Poker, 6" tile, 8"x10" tile sizes only (so far). 70% royalty return. No packaging or printed rulebook options; ships as cellophane-wrapped banded decks.

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Physics is full of paradoxes, but one of the most famous is the contradiction between quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of general relativity. At last, a new set of incredible experiments may reconcile the two systems.

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“We’re in the post-antibiotic era,” Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, the deputy director of the US Centers for Disease Control, tells PBS. His agency just reported that at least 23,000 Americans die each year from antibiotic-resistant infections, more than the 15,000 who die from AIDS, notes health researcher Bill Gardener. And we’re running out of options.

Since penicillin became the first widely-used drug to fight infections in the 1940s, the success of antibiotics in killing germs has had evolutionary consequences: Germs that are genetically predisposed to survive these drugs have grown more numerous, some even transmitting resistance to other germs. This has resulted in an arms race between nature and pharmaceutical researchers trying to develop new medicines to target germs like clostridum dificle, one of three strains the CDC has identified as urgent threats:

The problem is that today, we’re losing this arms race. The number of new antibiotics entering the market has fallen in recent years, as this chart from the CDC shows, and many of the newest antibiotics aren’t as effective as their ancestors. Which is really bad, and not just because people can pick up infections. A lot of sophisticated modern medicine depends on temporarily reducing the strength of a patient’s immune system—think of chemotherapy treatments for cancer, organ transplants, skin grafts, and kidney dialysis. Antibiotics make it possible to protect these patients while their body can’t do it themselves, but absent germ-killing drugs, more of these approaches may simply become ineffective.

So where are the pharmaceutical companies? Largely pulling out of antibiotic research, which they view as less profitable than blockbuster drugs for cancer or lifestyle drugs targeting the aging baby-boomer population. Pharmaceutical research spending has shrunk overall in the last three years, and many companies, including Pfizer, Roche, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Eli Lilly, just don’t bother with antibiotics that could kill enterobacteriaceae, another urgent threat:

Much basic drug research has fallen to the government, but budget negotiations in Washington aren’t likely to fund an effective response. Both the CDC and the National Institute of Health, which makes grants to medical researchers, face further spending cuts as lawmakers contemplate reducing the budget of their parent, the Department of Health and Human Services, as much as 18.6% from last year’s already-shrunk spending:

For the NIH, that means fewer grants to lab researchers, including those working on antibiotics. At the CDC, those cuts make it harder for public health officials to track and isolate the resistant germs and set best practices for treatment to help avoid over-prescription. This has had some success: MRSA, the poster-child for scary bacteria resistance, is still a major killer but the number of infections have shrunk thanks to initiatives to improve care during intravenous hospital procedures. Similar efforts could help reduce antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, one of the most awful things we can think of:

The US government is taking some action to solve this problem, giving a special grant of $40 million to one company, GlaxoSmithKline, that still maintains a robust antibiotic research program, and allowing companies that produce them five extra years of protection from generic competition. The US Food and Drug Administration, which determines whether medicine is safe for public consumption, is also planning to loosen rules around antibiotic approval so new drugs can make it to market faster, which has some worried that ugly side effects could be missed or even ignored. But with the antibiotic pipeline running dry, there may be few other options.

ratak-monodosico:

Government, Monty Python Style

Popular Twitter users Sir Patrick Stewart, Vivienne Harr, and the Boston Police Department rang the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange this morning to commemorate Twitter’s initial public offering. The company initially priced 70 million shares at $26 each, and began trading shortly before 11AM EST at $45.10 per share on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol TWTR. Last year, we covered Facebook’s IPO.

Woke up to this… @jack pic.twitter.com/lm4pujNavA

— Andrew Borovsky (@borovsky) November 7, 2013

#Ring!

— Twitter (@twitter) November 7, 2013

.@Twitter owes success to its users, so gives #NYSEBell to @SirPatrickStew, @VivienneHarr & @Bostonpolice #TwitterIPO pic.twitter.com/fAprlGV8Vs

— (NYX) NYSE Euronext (@NYSEEuronext) November 7, 2013

photo via NYSE Euronext

An anonymous reader writes "After all the revelations about NSA's spying efforts, and especially after the disclosure of details about its Bullrun program aimed at subverting encryption standards and efforts around the world, the question has been raised of whether any encryption software can be trusted. Security experts have repeatedly said that it you want to trust this type of software, your best bet is to choose software that is open source. But, in order to be entirely sure, a security audit of the code by independent experts sounds like a definitive answer to that issue. And that it exactly what Matthew Green, cryptographer and research professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Kenneth White, co-founder of hosted healthcare services provider BAO Systems, have set out to do. The software that will be audited is the famous file and disk encryption software package TrueCrypt. Green and White have started fundraising at FundFill and IndieGoGo, and have so far raised over $50,000 in total." (Mentioned earlier on Slashdot; the now-funded endeavor is also covered at Slash DataCenter.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dangerous_Minds writes "GIMP, a free and open source alternative to image manipulation software like Photoshop, recently announced that it will no longer be distributing their program through SourceForge. Citing some of the ads as reasons, they say that the tipping point was 'the introduction of their own SourceForge Installer software, which bundles third-party offers with Free Software packages. We do not want to support this kind of behavior, and have thus decided to abandon SourceForge.' The policy changes were reported back in August by Gluster. GIMP is now distributing their software via their own FTP page instead." Note: SourceForge and Slashdot share a corporate parent.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

via http://bryanmk4.tumblr.com/post/65364932477?scmmusicplayer=adrianshum

Great characters are usually at their best when they're surprising us. A villain who is purely evil is never as interesting as a villain who sometimes expresses kindness. A killer with a code; a monster with a soft spot for kittens. Yet some video games this past generation just didn't seem to get that—they pushed us to play purely evil or purely good.

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So far, all the official announcements about Better Call Saul—the Breaking Bad spinoff starring Bob Odenkirk’s lovably slimy attorney at law, Saul Goodman—have characterized the project as a prequel that would cover Goodman’s pre-Walter White days. But then again, they had to say that, because the question of whether Saul Goodman would even have any post-Walter White days was yet to be resolved. Now, in an interview with IGN, Odenkirk has blurred the lines a bit, saying that producers Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould have “talked about prequel, but they’ve also talked to me about ...

Studio Mono needs your help in bringing its new online roleplaying game to the masses, to the tune of $70,000.

Dubbed "Insomnia," the game is described as "a co-operative online role-playing game with tactical elements and unique game mechanics in a sophisticated universe designed with a dark retro-futuristic dieselpunk style." Players will be presented with non-linear story options, many of which ask them to join forces with other players. That said, the Insomnia Kickstarter claims the game is more akin to traditional roleplaying games than their online counterparts.

"Players will be free to choose if they want to tackle the single player quest lines alone, or in co-op with two or three friends taking on the online PvP content, such as faction wars or global quest lines where more than 60 players could be taking part at any one moment," reads the game's description.

With 48 days remaining in the Insomnia fundraising effort, the game has accumulated $1,181 of its $70,000 goal. If your interest in this project has been piqued, you can find full information on Insomnia at its Kickstarter page. Assuming the game is able to raise the necessary funds, Insomnia will hit the PC, Mac and Linux platforms at some as yet undetermined point in the future.

Online RPG Insomnia seeks to build 'dieselpunk' universe originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 07 Nov 2013 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In an updated list of threatened species released today in 2011 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, The Western Black Rhinoceros has been declared extinct. The black rhino subspecies was last seen in western Africa in 2006. From an article updated today at CNN.com, which is making the rounds anew:

The IUCN warns that other rhinos could follow saying Africa's northern white rhino is "teetering on the brink of extinction" while Asia's Javan rhino is "making its last stand" due to continued poaching and lack of conservation.

[CNN]

When deciding what movie to go see, moviegoers are used to a rating system providing them with a few basic facts. The level of violence in the film, for example, and whether there’s sex or cursing. Now theaters in Swedish cinemas have added something new to their ratings system: Whether the film passes the Bechdel Test.