Category: interesting

Diane Blohowiak, IT director at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, switched the font on the campus e-mail systems because Century Gothic uses 30% less printer ink than Arial.

A wee bit of Adam’s thesis on how to confuse face-recognition cameras.

The Brotherhood of Eternal Love figured it could turn the entire world on to the mystical power of LSD.

One of the largest drug cartels in America, they distributed Orange Sunshine, arguably the most popular ‘brand’ of LSD in history; created the strain of pot known as Maui Wowie; and were the first to bring Afghan hash to the U.S.

So, Nick, what gave you the idea to write this book?
Basically, we ran a story in 1999 or 2000, “Laguna on Acid” by Bob Emmers, about a big Christmas concert, and deep in the article it mentioned this little-known group of surfers dropped acid onto the show from a plane.

That led to the idea to track those people down for a feature story. But no one from the Brotherhood talked to me until I was writing the book.

And this solves one of the last remaining mysteries of the 1960s: Who were they, and what were they trying to do?

“We were experiencing a whole new viewpoint of life that was so beautiful and loving and caring of others and the whole world. We felt connected to the source of all life.”

Nicholas Schou, an Orange County Weekly writer, tracked down members and associates of the Orange County counterculture group who spoke for the first time in decades about what seemed like a reasonable idea at the time.

Tell me more about what younger readers might get from this.
It will just blow their minds. I think young people today think America is still very divided, the two Americas that is still talked about all the time. But in the ’60s, it was way more divided than the way it is now.

Mark Morford:

Often do I hear the scintillating words, “Oh sweet Jesus Mark, that column you just wrote about neurotic fundamentalists/the Zen of Obama/divine kinkiness/Canada’s vile oilsands/gay Vatican lust/the need for more awe in the workplace just made my day/blasted coffee through my nose/completely wrecked my fragile relationship with my angry, born-again sister in Florida, and for that I should probably thank you.

Yo Cadet. What’s that in your hand?

Sophisticated software that can identify people’s faces as well as the specific size, shape or color of an object.

Unsettling? Are you kidding?

To a consumer, the prospect of having every aspect of a shopping trip or hotel stay chronicled may be unsettling and strike some as a major loss of privacy, but it is happening nonetheless

Sing to the tune of ‘Log Every Moment, Own Every Aspect’…

Stop a virus before it can enter a cell, an exciting breakthrough against the flu, HIV, Ebola, hepatitis C, West Nile, Rift Valley fever, and yellow fever.

Viruses are famous for their ability to adapt, but not if we break them first.

To date, antiviral agents only interfere with the virus after it has entered the cell. Now comes the long-sought molecule that will prevent these viruses from attaching to our cells.

Damage the viral envelope, the shell that protects a virus. Human cells can rapidly repair their membrane, but viruses can’t.

How to prevent the fusion of the virus particle with the host cell? The immunobiology lab of Ben Lee at UCLA · Searching our immune system functions · Screening 30,000 molecules · Sealed hazmat suits · Internal oxygen supplies  · Membrane Fusion · The Attachment Molecule.

Yes, ladies and gentleman, gravity is a horrible natural force for our poor bodies to endure, so allow me to introduce what they’ve known for years at NASA. A few moments counteracting gravity using the Old Age Rejuvenator Centrifuge will reverse the action of gravity! Come one and all. Get that spry as a whirling bucket feeling. Be centrifused today!

New research from Penn’s School of Medicine has opened up a clearer understanding of how the human eye communicates with the brain.

While earlier studies on vision have focused on what kind of information is sent from eye to brain, the Penn team instead wondered how fast and how much of that information is transmitted.

By studying an intact retina, the team found “spikes” of electrical impulses to the retina transmit data at 10 million bits per second—a speed that rivals computer connections of 10 to 100 million bits per second.

This volcano, Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull eruption, is a fissure more than one-half mile in length. Will the crack lengthen? Will the fissure cause flooding by spreading under the ice? Iceland wants to know.

Yes, much ‘suspenseful concern’ about fountains of lava near a field of glaciers.

• Toilet seat: 49 germs per square inch.
• Copy machine: 69 germs per square inch
• Fax machine: 301 germs per square inch
• Mouse: 1,676 germs per square inch
• Keyboard: 3,295 germs per square inch
• Desktop surface: 20,961 germs per square inch
• Phone: 25,127 germs per square inch

Touched equipment.

Side Threading. Why didn’t I think of that?

“Why can’t someone invent a better needle? We’ve been to the moon for goodness sake.”

Pam Turner’s Spiral Eye Needle is attracting crowds at trade shows. The Patent Office is showcasing.

The needle can be threaded with your eyes closed.

Here is  how to force a line break in WordPress.  An easy solution too!

Switch to the HTML editor and place this snippet at the end of the line. Validated code? I don’t know. It just works.

When I first shuddered at <?php echo get_settings(‘home’), I wholeheartedly agreed, because there’s much involved to install and adopt a premier community platform, but I wouldn’t have expected WordPress to be abandoning the carriage return. I was up all night trying plugins and raw PHP and HTML code snippets or switching off the TinyMCE Visual editor. Fail. The wpautop filter simply will not allow conventional <BR /> and <P> tags.

Here’s a css stylesheet solution:

p{
padding-bottom:7px;
}

Why? A padding of 7 pixels is average line height of a carriage return. Adjust accordingly.

And for special fun:

<p align=”left”> </p>

Pay attention now.  This is NOT your mother’s alignment. Do you see the space?  When wrapped in <code> tags using the WordPress HTML editor, wpautop sees %20, a blank line of one character, ASCII 255, the beloved transparent GIF, a preserved space. One is enough to fill a line.

Wpautop is a rat under the floor. Switching from the HTML editor to Visual might strip inserted code, sometimes and sometimes not.

“Trading anonymity for accountability has led to radically improved conversations. … A lot less antagonism and a lot more thoughtfulness and general politeness.”

Integrate identification.

New York City has rolled 350 carts loaded with fresh, local vegetables into its food deserts.

I was talking to myself while reading this that if you were Howard Hughes you would want to hire a writer exactly like the writer that knew his job the way this writer knows and if you were Howard Hughes somebody should tell you there’s a writer you want:

“But. I cannot figure out from the release or from press coverage very much of how the process, identified as potentially useful for batteries with an energy density far higher than anything we have now, works and what’s left after it works or how one would throttle such a thing.

“Science writers, in addition to the nose for nonsense, hype, and scam that any reporter needs if he or she is worth a paycheck, need to work particularly hard at sheer explanation. That’s our added value – ability to boil the technical jargon and concepts of biology or physics or chemistry that terrify most reporters and reduce it to reasonably simple English. Throw in some narrative on the discovery process and its context you have a story.

“If a phenomenon is new to science or merely to the layman, this means taking the reader inside the genomes or stellar cores or combustion chambers or atoms and molecules and widgetry to provide a sense, however shielded in metaphor and simile, of what in tarnation is supposedly going on.

“Sometimes it’s almost impossible. But in this case it seems doable, even on deadline. This did not, it appears, get much pickup in mass media. Where it did, there is heat but little light.

Yo. The story might or might not be important. But p-p-please notice the writer, Charlie Petit, offers no shuck.

AP’s Science Writer says, “Not more quakes, just more people in quake zones”.

“Tectonically, the Earth is up to no particular mischief”, says MIT’s Charlie Petit.

A Canadian water utility published a graph of water consumption during the gold medal Olympic hockey game. About 80% of the country had tuned in.

Way-y-y before the web, there’s letterhead.
For example, the suitable header of Nikola Tesla, circa 1900.

Bart Weetjens, a rodent enthusiast, realized he could train rats to sniff out land mines. The rats run along wires between two handlers. When they smell a landmine, they stop, sniff the ground and begin to dig, signaling an explosive.

Next? Smuggled drugs and medical screening. Cheaper than dogs.

C’mon! Get going, rest of the universe!

Trillions of bacteria live in our mouth, skin, lungs and especially the gut. There are 10 times more microbes inside our body than there are our own human cells !

1000 species live inside humans, the vast majority recently discovered. One individual might carry at least 160 different species.

1. Mothers who worried their children might become drinkers had kids that were significantly more likely to drink.
2. Alcohol is so embedded in most cultures that perceptions and reality intermix in surprising ways.

A Sober Assesment