The authors of the entertaining 388-page Conspiracy Theories and Secret Societies For Dummies make short work of debunking a bunch of popular tinfoil hat bugaboos, like Roswell, Area 51, underground government installations, chemtrails, faked moon landings, 911 truthers, Illuminati, etc. They also have a good section explaining why some people are attracted to conspiracy theories, and tips for being a good skeptic. The paperback version is just $8.42 and according to the decription, it was was required reading in a 2010 course on conspiracy at Harvard University. My kids are at the age when they are wondering about conspiracy theories, because it is a appealing but flawed filter for understanding a complicated world. I'm hoping they'll read it. I wish I had this book when I was a teenager.
Background image by Adamgasth - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link Read the rest
The producers of last year's disastrous Fyre Fest should consider hiring Atlanta entrepreneur Tiffany Brown, whose company, Tribute Contracting LLC, was awarded a $156 million contract from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to deliver 30 million meals to starving Puerto Ricans. According to the New York Times, "By the time 18.5 million meals were due, Tribute had delivered only 50,000."
From the New York Times:
For this huge task, FEMA tapped Tiffany Brown, an Atlanta entrepreneur with no experience in large-scale disaster relief and at least five canceled government contracts in her past. FEMA awarded her $156 million for the job, and Ms. Brown, who is the sole owner and employee of her company, Tribute Contracting LLC, set out to find some help.
Ms. Brown, who is adept at navigating the federal contracting system, hired a wedding caterer in Atlanta with a staff of 11 to freeze-dry wild mushrooms and rice, chicken and rice, and vegetable soup. She found a nonprofit in Texas that had shipped food aid overseas and domestically, including to a Houston food bank after Hurricane Harvey.
By the time 18.5 million meals were due, Tribute had delivered only 50,000. And FEMA inspectors discovered a problem: The food had been packaged separately from the pouches used to heat them. FEMA’s solicitation required “self-heating meals.”
“Do not ship another meal. Your contract is terminated,” Carolyn Ward, the FEMA contracting officer who handled Tribute’s agreement, wrote to Ms. Brown in an email dated Oct. 19 that Ms. Brown provided to The New York Times.
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Botin Restaurant in Madrid has been in operation for 293 years, a world record. The owners claim the oven hasn't once gone out. The house specialty is roast suckling pig, which is 25 euros.
Ever since the doors opened in 1725, the oven has been sizzling continuously, never to be extinguished. According to deputy manager Luis Javier Sànchez Alvarez, the oven is the crown jewel of the restaurant and the fundamental element of their most popular dish, the roast suckling pig. The recipes used today have been passed down from generation to generation, keeping the legacy of these traditional dishes alive. With the honor of being the oldest restaurant in the world, Alvarez hopes to keep the doors open for centuries to come.
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Last year Scotty of Strange Parts made an iPhone from spare parts he picked up at the mind-boggling electronics markets in Shenzhen, China. He recently returned to buy parts to make a one-of-a-kind iPhone from parts. In this video he selects a back and gets it laser engraved with a neat design.
Enough of these boring looking iPhones - let's make a custom Strange Parts iPhone here in Shenzhen, China. I headed out to the cell phone parts markets in Huaqiangbei, to find a custom iPhone back. I then headed off to the laser engraving booths to have them etch a custom design in the iphone back. I think it came out pretty well!
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Trump has ordered a grand military parade later this year in Washington. No one in the military is sure how to pay for it. GoFundMe?
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I've used this 12-outlet power strip (under my desk and against the wall) for years and it has never given me any problems. The outlets are spaced far apart so I never have to worry about adapters covering up neighboring outlets. It's 4 feet long and made of metal and the power cord is 6 feet. The power switch lights up and has a built in circuit breaker to protect your devices. Amazon has it on sale for the next three hours for $30. Read the rest
Senator for Illinois Tammy Duckworth didn't take kindly to Trump's claim that anyone who doesn't clap for him like a trained chimp is guilty of treason, a crime punishable by death. She tweeted, "We don't live in a dictatorship or a monarchy. I swore an oath — in the military and in the Senate — to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, not to mindlessly cater to the whims of Cadet Bone Spurs and clap when he demands I clap."
Bone spur image by James Heilman, MD - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
Trump hair image by Michael Vadon, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link Read the rest
Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, which owns Doritos, was interviewed on the Freakonomics podcast recently. She said her company is making a less crunchy version of Doritos because "woman don’t lick their fingers generously and they don’t like to pour the little broken pieces and the flavor into their mouth," at least not in public.
NOOYI: When you eat out of a flex bag — one of our single-serve bags — especially as you watch a lot of the young guys eat the chips, they love their Doritos, and they lick their fingers with great glee, and when they reach the bottom of the bag they pour the little broken pieces into their mouth, because they don’t want to lose that taste of the flavor, and the broken chips in the bottom. Women would love to do the same, but they don’t. They don’t like to crunch too loudly in public. And they don’t lick their fingers generously and they don’t like to pour the little broken pieces and the flavor into their mouth.
DUBNER: So is there a male and female version of chips that you’re playing with, or no?
NOOYI: It’s not a male and female as much as “are there snacks for women that can be designed and packaged differently?” And yes, we are looking at it, and we’re getting ready to launch a bunch of them soon. For women, low-crunch, the full taste profile, not have so much of the flavor stick on the fingers, and how can you put it in a purse?
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Jupiter's moon Europa has a complex highway system as can be seen in this flyover video edited by NASA engineer Kevin Gill.
Processed using low resolution color images (IR, Green, Violet) from March 29 1998 overlaying higher resolution unfiltered images taken September 26 1998. Map projected to Mercator, scale is approximately 225.7 meters per pixel, representing a span of about 1,500 kilometers.
[via Kottke] Read the rest
Without a doubt one of the coolest looking insects around, the Hercules beetle is now a threatened species as a result of deforestation. Great Big Story's 80-second video has beautiful footage of this majestic animal.
Reaching up to 17 cm in length, the Hercules beetle is one of the largest insects in the world. They’re commonly identified by the characteristic horn-like pincers found on male beetles. Just like its heroic namesake, these little guys are strong. They can lift and carry up to 850 times their own weight. Despite their formidable strength, deforestation and loss of habitat has left the species threatened in the wild.
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Super Mario Odyssey producer Yoshiaki Koizumi kindly answered questions about Nintendo's famous characters of the Mushroom Kingdom, such as "Why does Mario have nipples but not a belly button?" and “Is Toad’s head a hat or a head?”
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On January 17, 2017, Girl 4 Trump USA joined Twitter. She was silent for a week, but on January 24, she suddenly got busy, posting an average of 1,289 tweets a day, many of which were in support of U.S. President Donald Trump. By the time Twitter figured out that Girl 4 Trump USA was a bot, “she” had tweeted 34,800 times. Twitter deleted the account, along with a large number of other Twitter bots with “MAGA,” “deplorable,” and “trump” in the handle and avatar images of young women in bikinis or halter tops, all posting the same headlines from sources like the Kremlin broadcaster RT. But Twitter can’t stop the flood of bots on its platform, and the botmakers are getting smarter about escaping detection.
What’s going on? That’s what Sam Woolley is finding out. Woolley, who recently joined Institute for the Future as a Research Director, was the Director of Research at the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford University. In this episode of For Future Reference, we asked Sam to share highlights of his research showing how political botnets — what he calls computational propaganda — are being used to influence public opinion.
Listen to the podcast interview with Sam Woolley here. Subscribe to the IFTF podcast on iTunes | RSS | Download MP3 Read the rest
Charles Platt's growing series of electronics books are the best I've come across. He explains concepts very clearly, and his illustrations are excellent. His latest book in the series is called Easy Electronics. It covers voltage, resistance, capacitors, transistors, integrated circuits and more. No tools are needed to make the projects. The book is just $5 on Amazon.
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Using a cell phone won't harm you, according to a draft report issued on Friday by the US Department of Health and Human Services' National Toxicology Program.
From the LA Times:
"The reports don't go much further than what we had reported earlier, and I have not changed the way I use a cellphone," NTP senior scientist John Bucher said in a briefing.
Dr. Otis Brawley, the chief medical and scientific officer for the American Cancer Society, said that the new evidence should not alarm wireless phone users.
"The evidence for an association between cellphones and cancer is weak, and so far, we have not seen a higher cancer risk in people," Brawley said in a statement.
Interestingly, rats exposed to the radiation lived longer than control group rats.
LA Times:
The researchers also reported that rats and mice exposed to radiofrequency radiation developed more tumors in the brain, prostate, liver, pancreas, pituitary gland and adrenal gland. But they said they weren't sure whether the radiation was responsible.
Among non-cancer risks, rat pups had lower birth weights when their mothers were exposed to high levels of radiation during pregnancy and while they were nursing. However, the rats ultimately grew to normal size.
Strikingly, the rats exposed to radiation lived longer than rats in an unexposed group that served as controls.
The researchers were at a loss to explain this. Perhaps the radiation reduces inflammation, as is seen in a therapy called microwave diathermy, they said. Or it could just be chance.
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James Conley III (29) went shopping at an Old Navy in West Des Moines, Iowa. When he went to the checkout counter to pay for some items, the clerk asked him if he also wanted to buy the jacket he was wearing.
From Conley's Facebook page:
The store manager Beau Carter was very unprofessional and stereotyped me because I was a Black male. He says "anytime someone wears Old Navy clothing they have to always scan that customers clothing to insure that it was previously purchased". (Where do they do that at?) Every time I go to this store I have on my same exact winter blue jacket and have never been asked to scan my clothing and the previous "non-black" customers had on identical apparel as me from old navy but was never asked to scan their clothing. Then after they scan my jacket they try to make me repay for it?? Finally the District Manager Shannon (who refused to give out her last name) came out and I made her check the surveillance tape to prove that her and her fellow employees were in the wrong for racially profiling me because of the color of my skin. Once she confirmed that I was telling the truth (after watching the tape) she never came back out to apologize to me nor did the store manager Beau Carter as you can see in my videos below.
As a result Old Navy fired three employees at the store.
Image by Steve Morgan/Wikipedia, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Read the rest
Watch the video to make sure my summary here is right: You are in a dark room with a pile of coins. The coins have a silver side and a gold side. You know two things about the coins. There are hundreds coins. 20 of the coins are silver side up and the rest are gold side up. It's your job to make two piles of coins that have the same number of silver side up coins. The room is in total darkness and each coin feels the same on both coins.
This video says there in "a surprisingly easy solution." I haven't solved it yet but I have a pile of nickels and I'm going to give it a try.
[via Twisted Sifter] Read the rest
Kaplamino's "The Blue Marble" is made from ordinary items like rubber bands, magnets, blocks of wood, pencils, bottle caps, and plastic forks, but he turns it into an almost magical chain reaction machine on a tilted wood plane.
After 3 months of work and probably more than 500 fails, I'm happy to present you my best video ever. Since magnets and marbles I've always wanted to make a big chain reaction in one take with this 2D style !
It's also a "one marble path" which means you have to follow the same marble for all the tricks (in that case the little blue one.) Because everything is in a tilted plane, the hard part was to find different ways of having the marble riding up along the table (magnets, falling weight, catapult ...). To do that, the marble has to be light. And because everything has to be triggered by this little marble, all the tricks are very unstable. Most fails happened when an element fall down earlier than expected.
I learned a lot about chain reaction, and I discovered the amazing power of the hot glue gun!
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