Tadeu

This is my first time hearing about this, probably because it only happens every 17 years. After 17 years of development in the ground (getting nourishment from tree roots), the Cicada insects are starting to swarm on the east coast. Hundreds of millions of them mate, make a lot of noise, and then die. Adam Becker and Peter Aldhous for New Scientist mapped data maintained by John Cooley and Chris Simon from the University of Connecticut to show the cycles of the Cicada.

There are 17-year broods, which is what's happening now, and there are 13-year broods, with the next one expected next year in Louisiana.

Click the play button on the top right to see the various broods appear over time, and be sure to turn on the audio (in the left panel) for added flavor. [Thanks, Peter]

Uma das coisas mais legais do Predador foi o sistema de visão multi-espectral dele. Tão legal que deixou muita gente do Pentágono agitada, memorandos voaram entre departamentos e o DARPA criou óculos semelhantes para forças especiais. Sim, Osama foi morto em Full Technicollor. Só que luz é só parte da equação.

Som em essência também é uma onda que se propaga no ar, e embora não tenha a mesma resolução de uma onda luminosa no espectro visível, pode ser útil transformar a informação sonora em visual. É isso que este breguete aqui faz:

Parece um par de alto-falantes daqueles caríssimos que audiófilos otários adoram, mas é basicamente o contrário. O SeeSV-S205 é um conjunto de 30 microfones em um padrão espiral que transforma som nisto aqui:

Isso mesmo: Ele gera um mapa visual em tempo real com a origem do som. Isso é excelente para testar maquinaria e identificar aquela batidinha chata no carro que seu mecânico insiste em dizer que não existe, mas na verdade é um crânio de rato dentro do tanque de gasolina.

É criação de uma firma da Pior Coréia, e não há indicação de preços. Acho que você vai ter que se acostumar com o ex-mickey.

brigwife:

politicalprof:

jeffmiller:

This is the secret to life.

Politicalprof: David Foster Wallace explains it all to you. Listen.

There is no way to overstate how much we recommend taking 10 minutes to watch this video. 

You can see the resemblance, can't you? This is a Megalopyge opercularis, or flannel moth caterpillar. It was spotted by photographer Jeff Cremer and biologist Phil Torres in the Peruvian rainforest. They look furry, and will become a fluffy moth as well, but don't touch it! Its "fur" is made up of venomous spines that can cause painful swelling that lasts for days. Link -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: Phil Torres)

I remember being endlessly entertained by the adventures of my toys. Some days they died repeated, violent deaths, other days they traveled to space or discussed my swim lessons and how I absolutely should be allowed in the deep end of the pool, especially since I was such a talented doggy-paddler.


I didn't understand why it was fun for me, it just was.


But as I grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made my toys fun. I remember looking at them and feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren't the same.


I played out all the same story lines that had been fun before, but the meaning had disappeared. Horse's Big Space Adventure transformed into holding a plastic horse in the air, hoping it would somehow be enjoyable for me. Prehistoric Crazy-Bus Death Ride was just smashing a toy bus full of dinosaurs into the wall while feeling sort of bored and unfulfilled.  I could no longer connect to my toys in a way that allowed me to participate in the experience.


Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything.

At first, though, the invulnerability that accompanied the detachment was exhilarating. At least as exhilarating as something can be without involving real emotions.


The beginning of my depression had been nothing but feelings, so the emotional deadening that followed was a welcome relief.  I had always wanted to not give a fuck about anything. I viewed feelings as a weakness — annoying obstacles on my quest for total power over myself. And I finally didn't have to feel them anymore.

But my experiences slowly flattened and blended together until it became obvious that there's a huge difference between not giving a fuck and not being able to give a fuck. Cognitively, you might know that different things are happening to you, but they don't feel very different.


Which leads to horrible, soul-decaying boredom.

I tried to get out more, but most fun activities just left me existentially confused or frustrated with my inability to enjoy them.


Months oozed by, and I gradually came to accept that maybe enjoyment was not a thing I got to feel anymore. I didn't want anyone to know, though. I was still sort of uncomfortable about how bored and detached I felt around other people, and I was still holding out hope that the whole thing would spontaneously work itself out. As long as I could manage to not alienate anyone, everything might be okay!

However, I could no longer rely on genuine emotion to generate facial expressions, and when you have to spend every social interaction consciously manipulating your face into shapes that are only approximately the right ones, alienating people is inevitable.


Everyone noticed.


It's weird for people who still have feelings to be around depressed people. They try to help you have feelings again so things can go back to normal, and it's frustrating for them when that doesn't happen. From their perspective, it seems like there has got to be some untapped source of happiness within you that you've simply lost track of, and if you could just see how beautiful things are...


At first, I'd try to explain that it's not really negativity or sadness anymore, it's more just this detached, meaningless fog where you can't feel anything about anything — even the things you love, even fun things — and you're horribly bored and lonely, but since you've lost your ability to connect with any of the things that would normally make you feel less bored and lonely, you're stuck in the boring, lonely, meaningless void without anything to distract you from how boring, lonely, and meaningless it is.


But people want to help. So they try harder to make you feel hopeful and positive about the situation. You explain it again, hoping they'll try a less hope-centric approach, but re-explaining your total inability to experience joy inevitably sounds kind of negative; like maybe you WANT to be depressed. The positivity starts coming out in a spray — a giant, desperate happiness sprinkler pointed directly at your face. And it keeps going like that until you're having this weird argument where you're trying to convince the person that you are far too hopeless for hope just so they'll give up on their optimism crusade and let you go back to feeling bored and lonely by yourself.


And that's the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn't always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn't even something — it's nothing. And you can't combat nothing. You can't fill it up. You can't cover it. It's just there, pulling the meaning out of everything. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem.

It would be like having a bunch of dead fish, but no one around you will acknowledge that the fish are dead. Instead, they offer to help you look for the fish or try to help you figure out why they disappeared.


The problem might not even have a solution. But you aren't necessarily looking for solutions. You're maybe just looking for someone to say "sorry about how dead your fish are" or "wow, those are super dead. I still like you, though."


I started spending more time alone.


Perhaps it was because I lacked the emotional depth necessary to panic, or maybe my predicament didn't feel dramatic enough to make me suspicious, but I somehow managed to convince myself that everything was still under my control right up until I noticed myself wishing that nothing loved me so I wouldn't feel obligated to keep existing.


It's a strange moment when you realize that you don't want to be alive anymore. If I had feelings, I'm sure I would have felt surprised. I have spent the vast majority of my life actively attempting to survive. Ever since my most distant single-celled ancestor squiggled into existence, there has been an unbroken chain of things that wanted to stick around.


Yet there I was, casually wishing that I could stop existing in the same way you'd want to leave an empty room or mute an unbearably repetitive noise.


That wasn't the worst part, though. The worst part was deciding to keep going.


When I say that deciding to not kill myself was the worst part, I should clarify that I don't mean it in a retrospective sense. From where I am now, it seems like a solid enough decision. But at the time, it felt like I had been dragging myself through the most miserable, endless wasteland, and — far in the distance — I had seen the promising glimmer of a slightly less miserable wasteland. And for just a moment, I thought maybe I'd be able to stop and rest. But as soon as I arrived at the border of the less miserable wasteland, I found out that I'd have to turn around and walk back the other way.


Soon afterward, I discovered that there's no tactful or comfortable way to inform other people that you might be suicidal. And there's definitely no way to ask for help casually.


I didn't want it to be a big deal. However, it's an alarming subject. Trying to be nonchalant about it just makes it weird for everyone.


I was also extremely ill-prepared for the position of comforting people. The things that seemed reassuring at the time weren't necessarily comforting for others.

I had so very few feelings, and everyone else had so many, and it felt like they were having all of them in front of me at once. I didn't really know what to do, so I agreed to see a doctor so that everyone would stop having all of their feelings at me.


The next few weeks were a haze of talking to relentlessly hopeful people about my feelings that didn't exist so I could be prescribed medication that might help me have them again.


And every direction was bullshit for a really long time, especially up. The absurdity of working so hard to continue doing something you don't like can be overwhelming. And the longer it takes to feel different, the more it starts to seem like everything might actually be hopeless bullshit.


My feelings did start to return eventually. But not all of them came back, and they didn't arrive symmetrically.

I had not been able to care for a very long time, and when I finally started being able to care about things again, I HATED them. But hatred is technically a feeling, and my brain latched onto it like a child learning a new word.


Hating everything made all the positivity and hope feel even more unpalatable. The syrupy, over-simplified optimism started to feel almost offensive.


Thankfully, I rediscovered crying just before I got sick of hating things.  I call this emotion "crying" and not "sadness" because that's all it really was. Just crying for the sake of crying. My brain had partially learned how to be sad again, but it took the feeling out for a joy ride before it had learned how to use the brakes or steer.


At some point during this phase, I was crying on the kitchen floor for no reason. As was common practice during bouts of floor-crying, I was staring straight ahead at nothing in particular and feeling sort of weird about myself. Then, through the film of tears and nothingness, I spotted a tiny, shriveled piece of corn under the refrigerator.


I don't claim to know why this happened, but when I saw the piece of corn, something snapped. And then that thing twisted through a few permutations of logic that I don't understand, and produced the most confusing bout of uncontrollable, debilitating laughter that I have ever experienced.


I had absolutely no idea what was going on.


My brain had apparently been storing every unfelt scrap of happiness from the last nineteen months, and it had impulsively decided to unleash all of it at once in what would appear to be an act of vengeance.


That piece of corn is the funniest thing I have ever seen, and I cannot explain to anyone why it's funny. I don't even know why. If someone ever asks me "what was the exact moment where things started to feel slightly less shitty?" instead of telling a nice, heartwarming story about the support of the people who loved and believed in me, I'm going to have to tell them about the piece of corn. And then I'm going to have to try to explain that no, really, it was funny. Because, see, the way the corn was sitting on the floor... it was so alone... and it was just sitting there! And no matter how I explain it, I'll get the same, confused look. So maybe I'll try to show them the piece of corn - to see if they get it. They won't. Things will get even weirder.


Anyway, I wanted to end this on a hopeful, positive note, but, seeing as how my sense of hope and positivity is still shrouded in a thick layer of feeling like hope and positivity are bullshit, I'll just say this: Nobody can guarantee that it's going to be okay, but — and I don't know if this will be comforting to anyone else — the possibility exists that there's a piece of corn on a floor somewhere that will make you just as confused about why you are laughing as you have ever been about why you are depressed. And even if everything still seems like hopeless bullshit, maybe it's just pointless bullshit or weird bullshit or possibly not even bullshit.

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Beer Hunt is the brand new social iPhone app that caters for the rapidly growing craft beer market. The app centers around beer check-ins and enables the tracking and discovery of new beers. This infographic visually displays the data received in the 10 days following the launch of Beer Hunt.

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Between buying Instagram and calling Facebook Home the "next version" of his social network, it's fairly clear Mark Zuckerberg's obsessed with the prime real estate on your smartphone. Israeli newspaper Calcalist is reporting that Zuckerberg and Co. are eyeing up crowdsourced GPS app Waze, which generates mapping data by pulling it from its users' devices in real time. The paper says that Facebook entered into discussions around six months ago, with prices in the $800 million to $1 billion range being mentioned -- and while that sounds like a big number, it's still only a dollar per user.

Filed under: GPS, Internet, Software, Mobile, Facebook

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Via: Reuters

Source: Calcalist (Translated)

There's so much data available on the internet that even government cyberspies need a little help now and then to sift through it all. So to assist them, the National Security Agency produced a book to help its spies uncover intelligence hiding on the web. 

The 643-page tome, called Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research (.pdf), was just released by the NSA following a FOIA request filed in April by MuckRock, a site that charges fees to process public records for activists and others.

The book was published by the Centre for Digital Content of the National Security Agency, and is filled with advice for using search engines, the Internet Archive and other online tools. But the most interesting is the chapter titled "Google Hacking".

By: Kim Zetter, Edited by: Liat Clark

Continue reading...

Em comemoração aos 40 anos do seriado Chaves, o jornal mexicano El Instransigente listou uma série de curiosidades sobre Ramón Goméz Valdés, o ator que interpretou o famoso Seu Madruga.

Muitas das informações divulgadas pelo jornal, até então eram desconhecidas por milhares de fãs que o seriado acumula pelo mundo todo, como por exemplo a fama de galã do ator, a briga que ele teve com a produção do Chaves e o fez abandonar as gravações, a emocionante história da Bruxa do 71 que não saiu nem por 1 minuto do lado do caixão do ator quando ele faleceu.

Enfim, montamos todas as curiosidades numa só imagem, em homenagem a esse, que com certeza é um dos personagens preferidos da televisão mundial, inclusive por uma enorme quantidade de brasileiros. Don Ramon, como era conhecido, com certeza marcou a infância de muita gente.

Muitas personalidades já faleceram precocemente, tanto por doenças, quanto por acidentes, suicídios ou assassinatos. Além de sua história, sua obra e seus admiradores, alguns famosos deixaram também uma última foto registrada antes de sua morte.

Segue abaixo um compilado das últimas fotos de famosos antes de morrer.

Lembrando que todas as fotos neste post já foram confirmadas por parentes, amigos ou imprensa, como realmente o último registro dessas pessoas em vida. Muito bom pra quem quer matar a curiosidade de como estava fisicamente seu ídolo antes dele morrer.

Steve Jobs

Bob Marley

Abe Lincoln

Adolf Hitler

Albert Einstein

Amelia Earhart

Amy Winehouse

Andy Kaufman

Anne Frank

Babe Ruth

Biggie Smalls

Chris McCandless

Elvis Presley

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Freddy Mercury

Mahatma Gandhi

George Harrison

Heath Ledger

James Dean

Jim Morrison

Jimi Hendrix

John Candy

John F. Kennedy

John Lennon

Keith Moon

Kim Jong Il

Kurt Cobain

Lucille Ball

Margaret Thatcher

Marilyn Monroe

Mark Twain

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Princess Diana

Richard Pryor

Ronald Reagan

Ryan Dunn

Steve Irwin

Tupac Shakur

From Andrew Oswald, via the excellent Angus:, here is the opening bit:

If everyone likes your work, you can be certain that you haven’t done anything important. Conflict and pain go with the territory –

that of changing how a profession thinks and furthering what we know about our world. The pressures on young researchers are to conform, to accept fashionable ways of analyzing problems, and above all to please senior professors and their own peers. Unfortunately this is bad for scientific progress.

portrait of the villain as a baby

jtotheizzoe:

Sound Meets Space

There’s no sound in space, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make sound inspired by space. The story of Joy Division’s iconic Unknown Pleasures cover, data from the first pulsar ever recorded: CP 1919.

There’s no real objection to escapism, in the right places… We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality… It’s a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. ARTHUR C. CLARKE

Leia mais...

The TARDIS Console Room through the Years

The Doctor. In the TARDIS. Next stop—everywhere.

The 2012 winners of the Wikimedia Commons Picture Of The Year 2012 contest have been announced. The picture below, made by French photographer Pierre Dalous, won first prize. The photo shows a pair of European bee-eaters in Ariège, France. The female (to the left) awaits the offering which the male will make.

image credit: Pierre Dalous cc

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The mother of Simpsons creator Matt Groening passed away recently. This is sad, and I do not intend to make light of it. Writing about famous people all day — especially online, from the comfort of your living room — can make it easy to forget that they’re also bags of skin that are filled with bones and muscles and feelings, and that they do not exist purely to provide us with things to discuss and/or yell about. So, yeah, first and foremost, condolences to the Groening family. Let’s not skip over that part.

The reason I bring all this up is because her obituary, which ran in her local Portland, Oregon newspaper, highlights just how much her son used his own life to develop one of the greatest television shows of all-time. The names really jump out at you once you know to look for them, especially her maiden name: Wiggum. I imagine Matt’s decision to use his mother’s family name for an inept, overweight police chief and his crayon-eating son may have led to some, uh … interesting conversations at one point or another.

The full obit is below.

(Via SFist, banner image via)

The post The Obituary For ‘Simpsons’ Creator Matt Groening’s Mother Features A Lot Of Familiar Names appeared first on UPROXX.

The bar with a tardis.


Mondays- $4 drafts
 Tuesdays- $4 well
drinks Wednesdays- $5 Jameson all night long
 Fridays 4-8pm- Teachers Appreciation Happy Hour


The most awesome of steampunk tap systems serving local craft beers.




It's larger on the inside.


Jetpack by Doc.


The Best Little Music Venue in Brooklyn


Music 7 nights a week.


Steam punk guitar by Joe Jung.


Bands from around the corner and around the world.

holzmantweed:

iamababs:

People keep saying “there should be a Doctor Who bar!” 

May I introduce you to Brooklyn’s “The Way Station”?

For the record, the Tardis photographed above really is larger on the inside.

I shit thee not.

Larger.  On.  The. In. Side.

Plus, it’s been autographed by Matt Smith and Karen Gillian.

On the inside.

Which is larger than the outside.

I have been inside it and I can attest to the truth of this statement.

(Phys.org) —North Carolina State University researchers have identified a new mechanism to convert natural gas into energy up to 70 times faster, while effectively capturing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2).