Breaking Spaghetti

"Two MIT mathematicians have figured out the trick to breaking spaghetti strands neatly in two: add a little twist as you bend. They outlined their findings in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." (Via H.R.)

Origins Of Money

"Conflict reigns over the history and origins of money". (Via Marginal Revolution.)

Ghostbusters Logo

"The Ghostbusters Logo Only Became Famous Because Of A Legal Screw-Up"

No Time Travelers

"The Utter Failure of Fictional Time Travel". An answer to why we’ve not been visited from the future?

Poker Professional Maria Konnikova

Professional poker player Maria Konnikova explains how she exploits irrational prejudices by male poker players to her advantage:

There are people who’d rather die than be bluffed by a woman. They’ll never fold to me because that’s an affront to their masculinity. 

I never bluff them. I know that no matter how strong my hand, they are still going to call me because they just can’t fold to a girl.

Other people think women are incapable of bluffing. They think if I’m betting really aggressively, it means I have an incredibly strong hand. I bluff those people all the time. 

FWIW, she has won $200,000 over the past year of playing professionally.

Parker Solar Probe

"As strange as it may sound, it's much more difficult to reach the sun than it is to leave the solar system altogether":

“I’m always amused when someone says, ‘Shoot X or so-and-so into the sun,’” says Rand Simberg, a space consultant and an engineer. “Because they have no idea how hard that is to do.”

The reason has to do with orbital mechanics, the study of how natural forces influence the motions of rockets, satellites, and other space-bound technology. Falling into the sun might seem effortless since the star’s gravity is always tugging at everything in the solar system, including Earth. But Earth—along with all the other planets and their moons—is also orbiting the sun at great speed, which prevents it from succumbing to the sun’s pull.

This arrangement is great if you’d like to avoid falling into the sun yourself, but it’s rather inconvenient if you want to launch something there.

More Superbugs

"Hospital superbugs are evolving to survive hand sanitizers"

My Father Is Steve Jobs

"I have a secret. My father is Steve Jobs."

Ultimate Bush Plane

"One man designed and built the ultimate bush plane". (Via H.R.)

Laundering Money With In-Game Purchases

Bruce Schneier: "Evidence that stolen credit cards are being used to purchase items in games like Clash of Clans, which are then resold for cash."

Xanadu Today

"Verses Composed Upon Reading A Review From TripAdvisor"

Battery Progress

"The next major innovation in batteries might be here":

Pellion’s battery can pack nearly double the energy of a conventional lithium-ion battery, making it able to, for example, double the time a drone can spend in the air. That 100% increase in energy density is a step change compared to the annual 10% or so improvement the battery industry currently averages.

Best Words

"10 of the best words in the world (that don't translate into English)"

Humidity And HFT

How humidity affects high-frequency trading and the global stock markets. (Via H.R.)

Ethics And Dog Cloning

"Inside the Very Big, Very Controversial Business of Dog Cloning"

Geek Disaster Movie

xkcd: "Disaster Movie". (Via B.E.)

Money-Losing Hardware

"Why Hardware Makers Rarely Make Their Money From Hardware"

Pure Sand

"The Ultra-Pure, Super-Secret Sand That Makes Your Phone Possible". (Via H.R.)

Lip-Reading AI

"Lip-reading artificial intelligence could help the deaf -- or spies"

Etymology Of “Orange”

"The etymology of 'orange': Which came first, the color or the fruit?"

Young People Who Can't Use Keyboards

"A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards"

Popcorn Robotics

"Prepare for Popcorn Robotics". (Via D.M.)

Paper Cutting And Electronics

"How Ancient Arts Are Inspiring Modern Electronics"

Hammacher Schlemmer

The World's Most Peculiar Company: How does catalog-loving retailer Hammacher Schlemmer continue to survive in the age of Amazon?

Kindle Clock

"This hack turns your old Kindle into a clock". (Via H.R.)

Darth Vader In Demand at Summer Weddings

WSJ: "Forget flower girls. Couples want stormtroopers throwing petals, and Vader leading the congo line."

Picard Returns

"Sir Patrick Stewart to reprise Picard role in new Star Trek series"

Daily Double Heat Map

Heat map of where the Daily Double appears on "Jeopardy!"

McScammer

"How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald's Monopoly Game and Stole Millions"

Check Engine Light

"What Your Check Engine Light Means and What To Do About It"

Big Pipe

Ars Technica: "661Tbps through a single optical fiber: The mind boggles". (Via H.R.)

Lockheed Fusion?

"Will Lockheed Martin Change The World With Its New Fusion Reactor?"

AI And Other Minds

"Artificial intelligence has learned to probe the minds of other computers"

TSA Surveillance Update

"Have you gained or lost weight? Congrats, TSA is now tracking you for suspicious activity."

Ethics of Penile Transplants

"Human Penile Transplantation: An Unjustified Ethical Dilemma?"

Shark Thieves

"Surveillance video shows trio stealing shark by disguising it as a baby"

Tsundoku

"Tsundoku: The art of buying books and never reading them"

[Off Topic] Hsieh Forbes Column: Why The Idea Of Single Payer Heath Care Won't Die

[Off topic] My latest Forbes column discusses how "single payer" health care keeps being rejected at the state level — often by Democrats.

Yet it keeps coming back, like a political zombie: "Why The Idea Of Single Payer Heath Care Won't Die."

Related piece by Steve Forbes: "Only Free Markets Will Save — And Strengthen Healthcare".

New Shape

"Introducing the Scutoid, Geometry's Newest Shape".

Original Nature article: "Scutoids are a geometrical solution to three-dimensional packing of epithelia".

Are You An Android?

The Onion: "New Study Finds Best Way To Determine If You Are Android Still Cutting Open Forearm To Reveal Circuitry Within"

Vader Visuals

"What made Darth Vader such a visually iconic character"

Ingenious Ice Cream

"DIY Ice Cream in Wartime"

Star Wars 9

"Lucasfilm confirms Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill will be in Star Wars: Episode IX"

Buddhism And Science

"For life's big questions, Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns try a scientific approach"

String

"The Long, Knotty, World-Spanning Story of String". (Via MR.)

Dense Memory

"Record-breaking solid state memory stores data at 100 times the density of Blu-ray". (Via H.R.)

Emotional Surveillance

"Employees' brain waves are reportedly being monitored in factories, state-owned enterprises, and the military across China"

Buddhist Funeral Service for Robot Dogs

"In Japan, a Buddhist Funeral Service for Robot Dogs"

Deep Learning Books

"The 7 best deep learning books you should be reading right now"

Thermal Password Cracking

"Thermanator Attack Steals Passwords by Reading Thermal Residue on Keyboards"

SHTF Plans

"How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse"

Rocket Plans

"Four huge rockets are due to debut in 2020 -- will any make it?"

Lost Galaxy

"The Andromeda Galaxy Ate The Milky Way's Lost Sibling"

Why You Shouldn't Leave Your Parabolic Mirror In Your Car

"Be careful with your parabolic mirror"

Toblerone Update

"A two-year travesty comes to an end as Toblerone reverts to its original shape"

Cave Rescue

"Risky Thailand cave rescue relied on talent, luck -- and on sticking to the rules". (Via H.R.)

Fake Vs. Real

"How to tell if you're talking to a bot"

Seeing Jaws For The First Time

Jason Kottke: "Everyone has that one obviously great and popular movie that they havent seen yet for no good reason. Mine is Jaws. Or at least it was. Last night, I finally watched it. What an experience..."

Blockchain Vs. Censorship

"Blockchain Is Helping to Circumvent Censorship in China"

Training Surgeons With VR

"Orthopedic Surgeons are Training in Virtual Reality"

Feynman Integral Trick

"Richard Feynman's integral trick"

Reading Ancient Texts

"Buried by the Ash of Vesuvius, These Scrolls Are Being Read for the First Time in Millennia":

The scrolls represent the only intact library known from the classical world, an unprecedented cache of ancient knowledge. Most classical texts we know today were copied, and were therefore filtered and distorted, by scribes over centuries, but these works came straight from the hands of the Greek and Roman scholars themselves. Yet the tremendous volcanic heat and gases spewed by Vesuvius carbonized the scrolls, turning them black and hard like lumps of coal. Over the years, various attempts to open some of them created a mess of fragile flakes that yielded only brief snippets of text. Hundreds of the papyri were therefore left unopened, with no realistic prospect that their contents would ever be revealed. And it probably would have remained that way except for an American computer scientist named Brent Seales, director of the Center for Visualization & Virtual Environments at the University of Kentucky...

Shoe Technology And Athletic Rules

NYT: "Nike Says Its $250 Running Shoes Will Make You Run Much Faster. What if That’s Actually True?"

Uncomfortable DNA Truths

"When a DNA Test Shatters Your Identity"

Insecure Voting

"Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States":

In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006," which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them.

The statement contradicts what the company told me and fact checkers for a story I wrote for the New York Times in February. At that time, a spokesperson said ES&S had never installed pcAnywhere on any election system it sold. "None of the employees, … including long-tenured employees, has any knowledge that our voting systems have ever been sold with remote-access software," the spokesperson said.

Wacky Gene Names

"Sonic hedgehog and Beethoven: An oral history of how some genes got their names"

Genomes To Face

"Researchers produce images of people's faces from their genomes":

Creating pictures of people’s faces from their genomes has a number of potential uses, especially in forensic science. It might be possible to reconstruct the face of a perpetrator from any genetic material they have left behind, such as blood or body fluids. That would allow police to “see” the face of suspects in cases of murder, assault and rape. It could also help with identifying unrecognisable victims who have been burned or maimed. Unsolved cases might be reopened if suitable samples were still available.

As Dr Venter is quick to point out, this technology has other implications, among them for privacy. He considers that genomic information must now be treated as personal information, even if it is presented as an anonymised sequence of letters—as is currently the case in some countries...

Making Mountains

"How to build a mountain range." (Via H.R.)

Man Overboard

"How often do people fall overboard on cruise ships?"

The Perfect S'more

"The Scientific Quest For the Perfect S'more"

Robo-Grading

"More States Opting To 'Robo-Grade' Student Essays By Computer"

Psychology of Roller Coasters

"The History and Psychology of Roller Coasters"

Oldest Color

"Scientists discover world's oldest colour -- bright pink". (Via H.R.)

Blazar Update

"The IceCube Neutrino Detector at the South Pole Hits Paydirt":

...And these led to the first ever identification of the birthplace of a neutrino from outside our galaxy: in this case, the unimaginably violent cosmic forge of a blazar.

Blazars are incredibly bright natural sources of radio waves. They form when some of the swirling material falling into a supermassive black hole is converted into a hot radiating soup of elementary particles and then gets blasted back out into space in the form of twin jets moving at close to the speed of light.

2018 Macbook Pros

"Apple's new 2018 MacBook Pros are now available, and the top specs are much faster". (Via H.R.)

Vatican Keymaster

"Meet the Man With the Keys to the Vatican"

Light Posting Notice

Admin note: Blogging may be lighter than usual the rest of this week and next week due to external obligations.

Police Technology Update

"Secret Policing: How Local Authorities Surveil Americans"

40 Years Of IVF

"Seven ways IVF changed the world"

Lando Calrissian Returns

"Star Wars: Billy Dee Williams Reprising Role as Lando Calrissian"

Digital Actors

"What if AI made actors immortal?"

Aluminum Foil Debate

"Aluminum foil: Which side to use?" (Via M.N.)

Spider Ballooning

"Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity"

Ping Pong Ball Trick Shots

"Insane ping pong ball trick shots". Click through to see the videos.

How Lawn Mower Blades Cut Grass

"The Physics of How Lawn Mower Blades Cut Grass (at 50,000 FRAMES PER SECOND)".

Direct link to video:

Drone-Ception

"The US has an anti-drone gun that shoots drones at other drones"

Roller Coaster In Living Room

Resourceful dad gives his daughter an awesome roller coaster ride in the living room.

(Note: Lots of laughter and shrieking.) #DadOfTheYear

Homemade Underground Temple

"Man Spends 23 Years Carving Sprawling Underground Temple Under His House":

Levon Arakelyan was 44 years old in 1985, when his wife asked him to dig a potato storage pit under their house in the village of Arinj, in Armenia’s Kotayk region. He obliged, but after finishing work on the pit, he just couldn’t stop chiselling, so he kept at it every day, for the next 23 years...

IEEE Statement On Strong Encryption

"IEEE Statement on Strong Encryption vs. Backdoors"

IEEE supports the use of unfettered strong encryption to protect confidentiality and integrity of data and communications. We oppose efforts by governments to restrict the use of strong encryption and/or to mandate exceptional access mechanisms such as "backdoors" or "key escrow schemes" in order to facilitate government access to encrypted data. Governments have legitimate law enforcement and national security interests. IEEE believes that mandating the intentional creation of backdoors or escrow schemes -- no matter how well intentioned -- does not serve those interests well and will lead to the creation of vulnerabilities that would result in unforeseen effects as well as some predictable negative consequences

You can read their full statement here.

Three-Torus

"Stepping into a Three-Torus"

Fermi Paradox Revisited

"Why haven’t we found aliens yet? A new paper on the Fermi paradox convincingly shows why we will probably never find aliens."

I'm actually still not convinced. But I thought it was worth flagging this argument for others to read.

Chaotic Clouds of Jupiter

NASA: "Chaotic Clouds of Jupiter":

NASA’s Juno spacecraft took this color-enhanced image at 10:23 p.m. PDT on May 23, 2018 (1:23 a.m. EDT on May 24), as the spacecraft performed its 13th close flyby of Jupiter. At the time, Juno was about 9,600 miles (15,500 kilometers) from the planet's cloud tops, above a northern latitude of 56 degrees.

The region seen here is somewhat chaotic and turbulent, given the various swirling cloud formations. In general, the darker cloud material is deeper in Jupiter’s atmosphere, while bright cloud material is high. The bright clouds are most likely ammonia or ammonia and water, mixed with a sprinkling of unknown chemical ingredients.

A bright oval at bottom center stands out in the scene. This feature appears uniformly white in ground-based telescope observations. However, with JunoCam we can observe the fine-scale structure within this weather system, including additional structures within it...

Too Many Meetings

"Tortured by meetings"

NYT On Descending Testicles

NYT: "The Evolutionary Origin of Descending Testicles"

Star Trek Spirits

"'Kirk Bourbon Whiskey' Launches Line of STAR TREK Spirits".

Available for pre-order here.

AI Vs. Dermatologists

"AI detects skin cancers with more accuracy than dermatologists":

“The CNN [convolutional neural network] missed fewer melanomas, meaning it had a higher sensitivity than the dermatologists, and it misdiagnosed fewer benign moles as malignant melanoma, which means it had a higher specificity,” Haenssle said. “This would result in less surgery.”

Amazon Delivery To The Himalayas

"Delivering Amazon Packages to the Top of the World". (Via H.R.)

Medieval Trade Routes

"Behold an Incredibly Detailed, Handmade Map Of Medieval Trade Routes"

Future Phones

"Whoa! Meet the future phones that fold up, have 9 cameras and charge over thin air."

Magnetically Activated Micromachines

"Magnetically Activated Micromachines to Operate Remotely Inside Body":

Engineers at MIT have created a class of magnetically activated bug-like microdevices that may foreshadow remote-controlled surgical tools and externally powered heart-assist pumps. These interesting devices have an origami-like look and a variety of them have been built that crawl, jump, grasp, and do other things. They’re actually printed from soft materials that have ferromagnetic nanoparticles within their interior, allowing a magnet to manipulate them.