Link Catchup - November 2012
2013 Automobile of the Year: Tesla Model S - "We weren't expecting much from the Tesla other than some interesting dinner conversation as we considered "real" candidates like the Subaru BRZ and the Porsche Boxster. In fact, the Tesla blew them, and us, away." (via HN) Also, 2013 Motor Trend Car of the Year: Tesla Model S (via HN)
Let's Limit the Effect of Software Patents, Since We Can't Eliminate Them - "We should legislate that developing, distributing, or running a program on generally used computing hardware does not constitute patent infringement." (via HN)
How to Get More Women in Tech in Under a Minute - "If you want to be respected in tech as a woman, don't call yourself as a girl". Via the also-awesome Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech, via HN.
Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars - "The real reason we weren’t going to Mars wasn’t a lack of national will; it was that we didn’t have cheap enough rocket technology to get there on a reasonable budget. [...] So I put together a team, and over a series of Saturdays I had them do a feasibility study about building rockets more efficiently. It became clear that there wasn’t anything to prevent us from doing it. Rocket technology had not materially improved since the ’60s-arguably it had gone backward! We decided to reverse that trend." (via HN) Also SpaceX CEO Elon Musk: Europe's rocket 'has no chance' (via HN), Huge Mars Colony Eyed by SpaceX Founder Elon Musk (via HN)
Permission to Suck - "The first couple of times you do it, you’re not going to be very good at it. Hey, you might not be very good at it for months, but if you make it a habit to try it, slowly, eventually, you’ll actually be good at it. [...] But before you can get there, you have to give yourself permission to suck." (via HN)
Loopholes - "Joseph Caramadre has a compulsion for loopholes, for seeing the angle in a deal and exploiting it. In fact, when he discovers schemes like this, he calls them his creations. He actually numbers them." - Ignore the "Prologue" and skim straight down to "Act One" (via Bruce Schneier)
Megaupload and the Government's Attack on Cloud Computing - "The government maintains that Mr. Goodwin lost his property rights in his data by storing it on a cloud computing service." (via /., HN)
How Do You Raise a Prodigy? - "On his way to kindergarten one day, Drew asked his mother, “Can I just stay home so I can learn something?” Sue was at a loss. “He was reading textbooks this big, and they’re in class holding up a blowup M,” she said." (via HN)
The Mathematics Behind xkcd: A Conversation with Randall Munroe (via HN)
Well, Search Me! - "Look, I have absolutely no problem with being searched. But if you’re going to do it, do it properly - the plane is no safer at all after this gentleman half-heartedly stroked me for a couple of seconds" (via Bruce Schneier)
Iowa, Ohio and Texas Take Stand Against Transparent Elections - "State officials from Iowa threatened independent international election monitors with arrest if they attempted to monitor voting in that state next week."
The Analog Letter: It’s Entirely Reasonable To Demand That Our Children Inherit The Rights Of Our Parents - "If a particular industry can’t continue to make money the same way in the face of sustained civil liberties, they get to go out of business or start selling something else. We don’t determine what civil liberties our children get based on who can make money and who can’t;" Also When Did It Become Our Job To Fix Their Business? - "It’s not our job to figure out how to fix their business models, especially when said business models are based on faulty or untenable assumptions. If you’ve been trying to grow oranges in Alaska, and make up the difference with farm subsidies, the end of subsidies is not a punishment, it’s well-deserved justice."
Speech Recognition Breakthrough for the Spoken, Translated Word - "Researchers at Microsoft Research and The University of Toronto came together to develop another breakthrough in the field of speech recognition research. [...] That one change, that particular breakthrough, increased recognition rates by approximately 30%" Simply mind-blowing demo. Via The Next Web, via HN.
What Programmers Want Is Less Stupid And More Programming - "the real motivator is writing great code, building cool products, and solving nasty problems." (via HN)
God, Why Don't You Show Yourself Anymore?
Copyright Industry Madness Takes 6 Years To Catch Up With The Worst Satire Of It - "Six years ago, a satire site wrote a story about how the copyright industry wanted more money if you invited friends to watch a movie in your living room."
The amount of crap [Windows] computer users have to put up with is incredible - "The first step was getting rid of the usual pre-installed crap. [...] It took me over an hour to go through all the uninstallers." *boggle* (via HN)
Duke University creates perfect, centimeter-scale invisibility cloak - "There are some caveats, of course. [...] For now, the Duke invisibility cloak only works with microwave radiation - and perhaps more importantly, the cloak is unidirectional (it only provides invisibility from one very specific direction). The big news here, though, is that it is even possible to create an invisibility cloak of any description." (via /.)
Animated Factorization Diagrams (via HN)
Lego Pop-up Todai-ji + Daibutsu (Buddhist Temple) (via ICHC)
Persistence - "Malala 1 - Taliban 0"
Some medicines that don’t work. Why doesn’t the MHRA tell us honestly? - "Nothing is known that alters the time course of a cold."
Inspired by a beetle that draws water from the air, scientist creates self-filling water bottle prototype (via HN, /.)
They told this DEA agent not to enforce drug laws in white areas. Really. - "The drug war is totally about race." (via Crommunist)
Hacking My Vagina - "The optional accelerometer input on the remote was a good idea, but I feel like the execution leaves much to be desired. The controls are laggy, and controlling the vibrator by tilting the controller never really felt right to me. So, naturally, I wanted to see if I could do better." (via HN)
CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual (via HN)
John Cusack & Jonathan Turley on Obama’s Constitution - "if he takes an oath before God to uphold the Constitution, and yet he decides it’s not politically expedient for him to deal with due process or spying on citizens and has his Attorney General justify murdering U.S. citizens - and then adds a signing statement saying, “Well, I’m not going to do anything with this stuff because I’m a good guy.”- one would think we would have to define this as a much graver threat than good or bad policy choices" (via Russell Coker)
The Troubling Dean-to-Professor Ratio - "The number of Purdue administrators has jumped 54 percent in the past decade-almost eight times the growth rate of tenured and tenure-track faculty. [...] “Why is it that we can’t find any money for more faculty, but there seems to be an almost unlimited budget for administrators?”" (via HN)
The Allegory that Blows 'Too Asian?' Apart - "Yu demonstrates how historical legacies of white privilege come to the fore when people grapple with issues of who gets admitted to colleges and universities. He also addresses the Maclean's article's distorted picture of affirmative action debates in the United States." (via Crommunist)
Free Market Failure: Telcos Charge More For Sending A Text Next Door Than Cost Of Sending Data From Mars - "the Mars Global Surveyor probe was [...] roughly 284,000 US dollars per gigabyte. [...] the traffic charge when sending an SMS text message next door is 383,000 US dollars per gigabyte."
First Gene Therapy Successful Against Aging-Associated Decline: Mouse Lifespan Extended Up to 24% With a Single Treatment (via HN)
Sword Dance and Shadowgraph (via ICHC)
New $7 Cup of Coffee at Starbucks - "You think you can even tell the difference between regular and a seven dollar cup of coffee?" (via ICHC)
Norway ringing in thorium nuclear New Year with Westinghouse at the party - "Many people believe that thorium is superior because it leaves less long- lived dangerous waste, makes it far more difficult to fashion bombs, runs more efficiently, and can be made meltdown proof." (via HN)
Best of the best are probably "How to Get More Women in Tech in Under a Minute", "Permission to Suck", "Speech Recognition Breakthrough for the Spoken, Translated Word", "Duke University creates perfect, centimeter-scale invisibility cloak", "Lego Pop-up Todai-ji + Daibutsu (Buddhist Temple)" and "New $7 Cup of Coffee at Starbucks"
Let's Limit the Effect of Software Patents, Since We Can't Eliminate Them - "We should legislate that developing, distributing, or running a program on generally used computing hardware does not constitute patent infringement." (via HN)
How to Get More Women in Tech in Under a Minute - "If you want to be respected in tech as a woman, don't call yourself as a girl". Via the also-awesome Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech, via HN.
Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars - "The real reason we weren’t going to Mars wasn’t a lack of national will; it was that we didn’t have cheap enough rocket technology to get there on a reasonable budget. [...] So I put together a team, and over a series of Saturdays I had them do a feasibility study about building rockets more efficiently. It became clear that there wasn’t anything to prevent us from doing it. Rocket technology had not materially improved since the ’60s-arguably it had gone backward! We decided to reverse that trend." (via HN) Also SpaceX CEO Elon Musk: Europe's rocket 'has no chance' (via HN), Huge Mars Colony Eyed by SpaceX Founder Elon Musk (via HN)
Permission to Suck - "The first couple of times you do it, you’re not going to be very good at it. Hey, you might not be very good at it for months, but if you make it a habit to try it, slowly, eventually, you’ll actually be good at it. [...] But before you can get there, you have to give yourself permission to suck." (via HN)
Loopholes - "Joseph Caramadre has a compulsion for loopholes, for seeing the angle in a deal and exploiting it. In fact, when he discovers schemes like this, he calls them his creations. He actually numbers them." - Ignore the "Prologue" and skim straight down to "Act One" (via Bruce Schneier)
Megaupload and the Government's Attack on Cloud Computing - "The government maintains that Mr. Goodwin lost his property rights in his data by storing it on a cloud computing service." (via /., HN)
How Do You Raise a Prodigy? - "On his way to kindergarten one day, Drew asked his mother, “Can I just stay home so I can learn something?” Sue was at a loss. “He was reading textbooks this big, and they’re in class holding up a blowup M,” she said." (via HN)
The Mathematics Behind xkcd: A Conversation with Randall Munroe (via HN)
Well, Search Me! - "Look, I have absolutely no problem with being searched. But if you’re going to do it, do it properly - the plane is no safer at all after this gentleman half-heartedly stroked me for a couple of seconds" (via Bruce Schneier)
Iowa, Ohio and Texas Take Stand Against Transparent Elections - "State officials from Iowa threatened independent international election monitors with arrest if they attempted to monitor voting in that state next week."
The Analog Letter: It’s Entirely Reasonable To Demand That Our Children Inherit The Rights Of Our Parents - "If a particular industry can’t continue to make money the same way in the face of sustained civil liberties, they get to go out of business or start selling something else. We don’t determine what civil liberties our children get based on who can make money and who can’t;" Also When Did It Become Our Job To Fix Their Business? - "It’s not our job to figure out how to fix their business models, especially when said business models are based on faulty or untenable assumptions. If you’ve been trying to grow oranges in Alaska, and make up the difference with farm subsidies, the end of subsidies is not a punishment, it’s well-deserved justice."
Speech Recognition Breakthrough for the Spoken, Translated Word - "Researchers at Microsoft Research and The University of Toronto came together to develop another breakthrough in the field of speech recognition research. [...] That one change, that particular breakthrough, increased recognition rates by approximately 30%" Simply mind-blowing demo. Via The Next Web, via HN.
What Programmers Want Is Less Stupid And More Programming - "the real motivator is writing great code, building cool products, and solving nasty problems." (via HN)
God, Why Don't You Show Yourself Anymore?
Copyright Industry Madness Takes 6 Years To Catch Up With The Worst Satire Of It - "Six years ago, a satire site wrote a story about how the copyright industry wanted more money if you invited friends to watch a movie in your living room."
The amount of crap [Windows] computer users have to put up with is incredible - "The first step was getting rid of the usual pre-installed crap. [...] It took me over an hour to go through all the uninstallers." *boggle* (via HN)
Duke University creates perfect, centimeter-scale invisibility cloak - "There are some caveats, of course. [...] For now, the Duke invisibility cloak only works with microwave radiation - and perhaps more importantly, the cloak is unidirectional (it only provides invisibility from one very specific direction). The big news here, though, is that it is even possible to create an invisibility cloak of any description." (via /.)
Animated Factorization Diagrams (via HN)
Lego Pop-up Todai-ji + Daibutsu (Buddhist Temple) (via ICHC)
Persistence - "Malala 1 - Taliban 0"
Some medicines that don’t work. Why doesn’t the MHRA tell us honestly? - "Nothing is known that alters the time course of a cold."
Inspired by a beetle that draws water from the air, scientist creates self-filling water bottle prototype (via HN, /.)
They told this DEA agent not to enforce drug laws in white areas. Really. - "The drug war is totally about race." (via Crommunist)
Hacking My Vagina - "The optional accelerometer input on the remote was a good idea, but I feel like the execution leaves much to be desired. The controls are laggy, and controlling the vibrator by tilting the controller never really felt right to me. So, naturally, I wanted to see if I could do better." (via HN)
CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual (via HN)
John Cusack & Jonathan Turley on Obama’s Constitution - "if he takes an oath before God to uphold the Constitution, and yet he decides it’s not politically expedient for him to deal with due process or spying on citizens and has his Attorney General justify murdering U.S. citizens - and then adds a signing statement saying, “Well, I’m not going to do anything with this stuff because I’m a good guy.”- one would think we would have to define this as a much graver threat than good or bad policy choices" (via Russell Coker)
The Troubling Dean-to-Professor Ratio - "The number of Purdue administrators has jumped 54 percent in the past decade-almost eight times the growth rate of tenured and tenure-track faculty. [...] “Why is it that we can’t find any money for more faculty, but there seems to be an almost unlimited budget for administrators?”" (via HN)
The Allegory that Blows 'Too Asian?' Apart - "Yu demonstrates how historical legacies of white privilege come to the fore when people grapple with issues of who gets admitted to colleges and universities. He also addresses the Maclean's article's distorted picture of affirmative action debates in the United States." (via Crommunist)
Free Market Failure: Telcos Charge More For Sending A Text Next Door Than Cost Of Sending Data From Mars - "the Mars Global Surveyor probe was [...] roughly 284,000 US dollars per gigabyte. [...] the traffic charge when sending an SMS text message next door is 383,000 US dollars per gigabyte."
First Gene Therapy Successful Against Aging-Associated Decline: Mouse Lifespan Extended Up to 24% With a Single Treatment (via HN)
Sword Dance and Shadowgraph (via ICHC)
New $7 Cup of Coffee at Starbucks - "You think you can even tell the difference between regular and a seven dollar cup of coffee?" (via ICHC)
Norway ringing in thorium nuclear New Year with Westinghouse at the party - "Many people believe that thorium is superior because it leaves less long- lived dangerous waste, makes it far more difficult to fashion bombs, runs more efficiently, and can be made meltdown proof." (via HN)
Best of the best are probably "How to Get More Women in Tech in Under a Minute", "Permission to Suck", "Speech Recognition Breakthrough for the Spoken, Translated Word", "Duke University creates perfect, centimeter-scale invisibility cloak", "Lego Pop-up Todai-ji + Daibutsu (Buddhist Temple)" and "New $7 Cup of Coffee at Starbucks"