{ The photograph on the right was doctored by the “beautification engine” of a new computer program that uses a mathematical formula to alter the original form into a theoretically more attractive version, while maintaining what programmers call an “unmistakable similarity” to the original. | NY Times | Continue reading }
Unique opportunity to buy a Northern European country: Iceland. (…)
PLEASE NOTE: GREENLAND AND Björk ARE NOT INCLUDED IN THIS AUCTION!
Police could one day predict the surname of male suspects or victims of crime from DNA alone, British researchers said on Wednesday.
Scientists at Leicester University, where DNA fingerprinting was invented in 1984, said they had demonstrated that men with the same surname were highly likely to be genetically linked.
The finding could help genealogy researchers as well detectives investigating crimes using traces of DNA found in blood, hair, saliva or semen.
The technique is based on analyzing DNA from the Y chromosome that imparts maleness and which, like surnames, is passed down from father to son.
Not surprisingly, the likelihood of a good genetic match depends on the rarity of the name, with the most unusual names having the strongest links.
A study of 2,500 men found that on average there was a 24 percent chance of two men with the same surname sharing a common ancestor but this increased to nearly 50 percent when the surname was rare.
Over 70 percent of men with surnames such as Attenborough and Swindlehurst shared the same or near identical Y chromosome types.
A humble fungus could help oil companies clean up their fuel to meet tightening emissions standards. The fungus, recently discovered in Iran, grows naturally in crude oil and removes the sulphur and nitrogen compounds that lead to acid rain and air pollution.
Worldwide, government are imposing increasingly severe limits on how much of those compounds fuels can contain. Oil producers are searching for more efficient ways to strip sulphur and nitrogen from their products.
The standard way to “desulphurise” crude oil involves reacting it with hydrogen at temperatures of 455 °C and up to 204 times atmospheric pressure (roughly 21 million pascals or 3000 psi). It achieves less than perfect results.
Micro-organisms able to metabolise sulphur and nitrogen have the potential to achieve the same endpoint under more normal conditions. In recent years a number of researchers have isolated desulphurising bacteria.
But Jalal Shayegan and his team at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, have now discovered and isolated a fungus that appears able to remove sulphur from oil with greater efficiency.
{ NewScientist | Continue reading }
We don’t expect OPEC to aggressively defend oil prices above $60/b, since higher prices slow economic and demand growth, which are not in OPEC’s best interests. (…) The oil market is not a free market, since 55% of world oil supply is controlled by OPEC and Russia.
A detailed analysis of powerplants in China by MIT researchers debunks the widespread notion that outmoded energy technology or the utter absence of government regulation is to blame for that country’s notorious air-pollution problems. The real issue, the study found, involves complicated interactions between new market forces, new commercial pressures and new types of governmental regulation.
China’s power sector has been expanding at a rate roughly equivalent to three to four new coal-fired, 500 megawatt plants coming on line every week, said Edward S. Steinfeld, associate professor of political science at MIT.
After detailed survey and field research involving dozens of managers at 85 power plants across 14 Chinese provinces, Steinfeld and his co-authors, Richard Lester (professor, nuclear science and engineering and director of the MIT Industrial Performance Center) and Edward Cunningham (doctoral candidate, political science) found that in fact most of the new plants have been built to very high technical standards, using some of the most modern technologies available. The problem has to do with the way that energy infrastructure is being operated and the types of coals being burned.
New market pressures encourage plant managers to buy the cheapest, lowest quality and most-polluting coal available, while at the same time idle expensive-to-operate smokestack scrubbers or other cleanup technologies. The physical infrastructure is advanced, but the emissions performance ends up decidedly retrograde.
{ MIT News | Continue reading }
Apparently, everybody loves clean coal. Barack Obama loves it and John McCain loves it. Joe Biden really loved it during his VP debate — and Sarah Palin loved it too. But here’s the problem. Clean coal is very much like a unicorn: it doesn’t exist. (…)
There are basically two meanings of “clean coal.” The first is new conventional coal plants, which can indeed be more efficient and cleaner than the awful old ones. But even the new ones are a disaster. New coal plants are “clean” in the same way that it’s “healthy” to switch from Marlboro Reds to Camel Lights.
The other meaning of “clean coal” is happy talk about futuristic coal plants that will capture and sequester carbon. I hope these arrive someday — truly I do — but at the moment they’re far beyond the engineering horizon.
{ Longer-lasting artificial eyes. An improved retinal implant stimulates neurons to restore sight. | Technology Review | Continue reading }
Most clocks just tell time, simply and reliably. Not the $1.8 million “time eater” unveiled at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge.
The masterpiece has no hands or digital numbers and it is specially designed to run in erratic fashion, slowing down and speeding up from time to time.
Inventor John Taylor used his own money to build the clock.
photo {William Eggleston }
There’s a new type of digital camouflage specifically designed to fool deer’s vision. Called Optifade, it’s being unveiled today by W.L. Gore, the inventor of Gore-Tex. (…)
the new digital camouflage consists of a micropattern made up of tiny squares that are supposed to match the overall texture of the landscape — the “spatial frequency” or “busyness” of the forest or scrubland as seen through the deer’s eyes. It also has a macropattern of large geometric shapes that are supposed to break up the outline of the body so that even if a deer sees a hunter moving, it doesn’t register in the deer’s brain as a human shape.
{ NY Times | Continue reading }
Do hunters really need any more technological advantages over the deer then they already have? To call deer hunting a “sport” is absurd; considering all the hardware available to hunters, the deer never stand a chance. Unless you’re hunting with nothing but a bow and some simple hunting clothes, you are engaging in the ritualistic slaughter of animals, not anything resembling a competition of the man vs. nature variety.
What’s a hulu? In August 2007, this question ricocheted through the blogosphere to a chorus of derisive laughter. Fox and NBC were going to make the Internet safe for television! They were building a “YouTube killer”! And they were calling it Hulu! It was almost too perfect—an absurdist topper to the idea that two major broadcast networks could devise an Internet video service people would actually use. The name was even more delicious than the venture’s placeholder moniker, NewCo., which the online world had changed to Clown Co. And now Hulu? It means “snoring” in Chinese, one blogger declared. “‘Cease’ and ‘desist’ in Swahili,” Michael Arrington reported on TechCrunch. “Perhaps they should have just stuck with Clown Co.,” he added.
Jason Kilar read these posts and winced. A 36-year-old ex-Amazon.com executive newly relocated to Los Angeles, Kilar had followed—even admired—many of these bloggers for years. Now he was Hulu’s CEO, and their ridicule wasn’t so funny. (…)
In March 2008, Hulu officially opened for business with more than 250 TV shows and 100 movies—not only from Fox, NBC, Universal, and their affiliated cable channels, but from new partners like the indie film studio Lionsgate and the television arm of Warner Bros., which makes shows for all the networks. Visitors were delighted to discover that they could quickly find and watch full-length programs and movies, even ones that weren’t hosted by Hulu.
Two months later, Hulu edged ahead of ESPN.com to become one of comScore’s top 10 US video sites. (…) The big question now is, can Hulu turn a profit?
Oh my god, you guys, I actually just sent an email that said:
“so i didn’t really get a chance to think about our little make-out rendezvous from a couple of weeks ago until tonight, when i went on your facebook page and saw that you deleted my “facebook wall” comment about us making out. that particular comment was meant to be a joke, it was supposed to be funny, and facebook is retarded and it was probably super retarded that i made a comment on your “facebook wall” or anyone’s “facebook wall” and facebook is for kids in high school that are grounded, anyway. but it’s even more retarded that you care so much about your “image” that you deleted my comment about us making out, and i can only ascertain that you did it in case the floozies were to check up on you to see it.
but the MAIN RETARDED PROBLEM in all of this is your stupid cheap motives of the following factors:
1) why you came over to my old apartment in the first place, and
2) why you kissed me, and, ultimately,
3) what all of your fuckin reindeer games are all about.yes, i’m drinking wine right now and yes, i’m over-tired from school, but seriously, YOU ARE LAME.
so good luck with your superficial antics and your facebook censorship. i get semi-indecipherable comments on my “facebook wall” from girls that i used to work with at kmart in international falls all of the time and i still leave them up there, because facebook is DUMB and MEANINGLESS and it would probably hurt their feelings if i were to erase their messages simply because it doesn’t fit with the persona that i’m trying to create in the DUMB FACEBOOK WORLD.
thanks for the mammories, tell your friends i say hi because i still really like them. you, on the other hand, are one of those ridiculous internet shitbags and i am SERIOUSLY OVER IT AND YOU.
BYE”
{ Ethan Hein | adapted from: Graph drawing of matrices in the University of Florida Collection }
