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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:45 | Votes:98

posted by mrcoolbp on Wednesday April 15 2015, @11:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the sea-mars-run dept.

The NASA Curiosity rover has found evidence [abstract] of "night-time transient liquid brines in the uppermost 5 cm of the subsurface that then evaporate after sunrise".

The observations point to a daily water cycle supported by perchlorate salts in the soil. Mars should be too cold to support liquid water on its surface, but the briny water has a lower freezing point.

posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 15 2015, @10:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the too-lazy-to-take-care-of-ourselves dept.
We recently covered AI creating recipes, now we can have robots make those recipes for us also.

The world's first robotic kitchen prepares crab bisque for breakfast:

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited along to a warehouse in north London to see what is being billed as "the world's first automated kitchen." The system, made by Moley Robotics in the UK, can only make crab bisque right now—and it requires that all of the ingredients and utensils are pre-positioned perfectly. The goal, though, is to have a consumer-ready version within two years, priced at around £10,000 ($14,600). The company envisions an "iTunes style library of recipes" that you can download and have your robot chef prepare.

In its current form, the Moley Robotic Kitchen is essentially two very expensive robotic arms, with two even dearer fully articulated biomimetic humanoid hands made by the Shadow Robot Company on the ends. In front of the robot is a kitchen—a sink, a stovetop, an oven, and a range of utensils, including the aforementioned blender. The ingredients are placed in bowls and cups on the worktop. Once everything is set up, an engineer simply presses "start" on the controlling PC, the robot arms whirl around for 30 minutes, and voilà: crab bisque.

Simply stunning. Fresh from the arms of your android girlfriend, you awake from a coding/WoW binge to a delicately prepared breakfast of crab bisque. Geek nirvana, here we come!

posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 15 2015, @08:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the better-than-batteries dept.

Spotted at phys.org is a story on a prototype video camera that is the first to be fully self-powered:

A leading researcher in computational imaging, Nayar realized that although digital cameras and solar panels have different purposes - one measures light while the other converts light to power - both are constructed from essentially the same components.
...
The pixel design is very simple, and uses just two transistors. During each image capture cycle, the pixels are used first to record and read out the image and then to harvest energy and charge the sensor's power supply—the image sensor continuously toggles between image capture and power harvesting modes.

Additional background at Columbia Engineering Computer Vision Lab

posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 15 2015, @06:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the dark-matter-matters dept.

Two recent studies are attempting to shine light on dark matter.

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) has published its preliminary findings. The project is attempting to map dark matter across 1/8 of the sky using 570-megapixel imagery from the Victor Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, in the Chilean Andes. The early results are a test of the project's first images and cover just 0.4% of the sky, yet it is "the largest contiguous dark matter map" ever made, revealing exactly where dark matter is concentrated amid 2 million galaxies.

A separate finding published this week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society may reveal how dark matter can interact with itself:

For the first time, the enigmatic quantity may have been caught interacting with other dark matter in a cluster 1.4 billion light-years away.

[...] A team of astronomers led by Dr Richard Massey of Durham University studied a simultaneous collision of four galaxies in the cluster Abell 3827.

Although dark matter cannot be seen, the team was able to deduce its location using a technique called gravitational lensing. While dark matter does not absorb or emit light, it does have gravity.

So it bends the path of light passing nearby, warping our view of anything on the other side of it. The dark matter in Abell 3827 bent the path of light rays coming from a distant background galaxy, which happened to be aligned just right for the team's purpose.

The researchers found that one dark matter clump appeared to be lagging behind the galaxy it surrounds. Such a lag between the dark matter and its associated galaxy would be expected if the mysterious stuff was interacting with itself - through forces other than gravity.

posted by takyon on Wednesday April 15 2015, @05:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the american-innovation dept.

The Chinese robotics company Ninebot has bought Segway, a maker of two-wheeled electric vehicles, for an undisclosed sum. In 2014, Segway accused Ninebot and several other Chinese companies of infringing on its patents and sought an import ban on the Ninebot One. As Segway has struggled to make profits it has changed ownership; in 2009, it was sold to a group led by British millionaire Jimi Heselden, who died after riding a Segway off a cliff in 2010.

According to the BBC:

In a statement, the companies said that both brands would continue to operate under their existing names.

"It [the acquisition] creates a development opportunity for the short-distance transportation industry, which the combined company will lead by widely applying a series of technologies, such as electric driving, mobile internet and human-computer interaction on future products," said Ninebot chief executive Lufeng Gao.

posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 15 2015, @04:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-what-soylentils-want-to-hear dept.

From BBC Future:

If ignorance is bliss, does a high IQ equal misery? Popular opinion would have it so. We tend to think of geniuses as being plagued by existential angst, frustration, and loneliness. Think of Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing, or Lisa Simpson – lone stars, isolated even as they burn their brightest. As Ernest Hemingway wrote: "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."

The question may seem like a trivial matter concerning a select few – but the insights it offers could have ramifications for many. Much of our education system is aimed at improving academic intelligence; although its limits are well known, IQ is still the primary way of measuring cognitive abilities, and we spend millions on brain training and cognitive enhancers that try to improve those scores. But what if the quest for genius is itself a fool's errand?

The first steps to answering these questions were taken almost a century ago, at the height of the American Jazz Age. At the time, the new-fangled IQ test was gaining traction, after proving itself in World War One recruitment centres, and in 1926, psychologist Lewis Terman decided to use it to identify and study a group of gifted children. Combing California's schools for the creme de la creme, he selected 1,500 pupils with an IQ of 140 or more – 80 of whom had IQs above 170. Together, they became known as the "Termites", and the highs and lows of their lives are still being studied to this day.

As you might expect, many of the Termites did achieve wealth and fame – most notably Jess Oppenheimer, the writer of the classic 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy. Indeed, by the time his series aired on CBS, the Termites' average salary was twice that of the average white-collar job. But not all the group met Terman's expectations – there were many who pursued more "humble" professions such as police officers, seafarers, and typists. For this reason, Terman concluded that "intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated". Nor did their smarts endow personal happiness. Over the course of their lives, levels of divorce, alcoholism and suicide were about the same as the national average.

As the Termites enter their dotage, the moral of their story – that intelligence does not equate to a better life – has been told again and again. At best, a great intellect makes no differences to your life satisfaction; at worst, it can actually mean you are less fulfilled.

posted by takyon on Wednesday April 15 2015, @02:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the click-monopoly dept.

BBC News reports that, following a 5-year investigation, the EU have filed an official anti-competition complaint against Google:

The Commission is responding to complaints that Google, which accounts for more than a [sic] 90% of EU-based web searches, favours its own products in search engine results.

The European Commission has investigated the antitrust allegations - made by Microsoft, Tripadvisor, Streetmap and others - since 2010.

They object to the fact that the firm places reviews from Google+, directions from Google Maps, music and videos from YouTube, and adverts from its AdWords platform ahead of others' links in relevant searches.

Google have not officially replied to the complaint yet and have ten weeks to do so, although they have informed staff they have "a very strong case" and that competition to its search business was "thriving". Competition commissions in India, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan and Canada have opened investigations - the US commission dropped its probe in 2013 after Google agreed to several non-binding commitments. Competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager has also launched an investigation into the Android operating system.

Google Search Senior Vice President Amit Singhal has published an unofficial response to the complaint. The Register has additional coverage (article from yesterday), reactions from interested parties, and a longer analysis by Andrew Orlowski. Bloomberg has a timeline of key events spanning the 5-year investigation.

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday April 15 2015, @01:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-your-momma's-chevy-nova dept.

Science Daily has an intriguing article, "Accelerating universe? Not so fast", which notes the discovery that type Ia supernovae, which are used as a 'standard candle' for measuring distances in the universe, actually come in two different subtypes. Though nearly indistinguishable in normal optical frequencies, the differences became apparent when examined in the ultraviolet. The significance is two type IA supernovae having the same luminosity may actually be located at different distances from us. This, in turn, calls into question how fast the universe is expanding.

So, if I measured the brightness of a "100-watt bulb" at 1km, and then measure another "100-watt bulb" and find it to have the same brightness, I would assume that it, too, was 1km away. Apparently some "100-watt bulbs" are dimmer than others — and, according to the inverse square law, would be closer to me than 1 km.

I've been unable to determine how much a difference this would cause in our estimation of the rate of the expansion of the universe. Also, I suspect this might affect our 3-D maps of the universe and what is located where. How will it affect the current thinking about "dark energy"? How much of an impact are we looking at here? What else might be affected?

[Continued after the break]

From the article:

The team, led by UA (University of Arizona) astronomer Peter A. Milne, discovered that type Ia supernovae, which have been considered so uniform that cosmologists have used them as cosmic "beacons" to plumb the depths of the universe, actually fall into different populations. The findings are analogous to sampling a selection of 100-watt light bulbs at the hardware store and discovering that they vary in brightness.

"We found that the differences are not random, but lead to separating Ia supernovae into two groups, where the group that is in the minority near us are in the majority at large distances -- and thus when the universe was younger," said Milne, an associate astronomer with the UA's Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory. "There are different populations out there, and they have not been recognized. The big assumption has been that as you go from near to far, type Ia supernovae are the same. That doesn't appear to be the case."

The discovery casts new light on the currently accepted view of the universe expanding at a faster and faster rate, pulled apart by a poorly understood force called dark energy.

[...] "The idea behind this reasoning," Milne explained, "is that type Ia supernovae happen to be the same brightness -- they all end up pretty similar when they explode. Once people knew why, they started using them as mileposts for the far side of the universe.

"The faraway supernovae should be like the ones nearby because they look like them, but because they're fainter than expected, it led people to conclude they're farther away than expected, and this in turn has led to the conclusion that the universe is expanding faster than it did in the past."

An abstract is available, article is paywalled.

Because of the slightly different colors for these groups, NUV-red SNe will have their extinction underestimated using common techniques. This, in turn, leads to underestimation of the optical luminosity of the NUV-blue SNe Ia, in particular, for the high-redshift cosmological sample. Not accounting for this effect should thus produce a distance bias that increases with redshift and could significantly bias measurements of cosmological parameters.

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday April 15 2015, @12:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the if-you-build-it-they-will-come dept.

Hackaday has an article on computer peripherals from former Soviet Union countries used in 80's era home computing.

... the lack of spare parts, literature and technology in Czechoslovakia forced geeks to solve it themselves: by improvisation and what we would today call “hacking.” Hobbyist projects of one person or a small party was eventually taken over by a state-owned enterprise, which then began to manufacture and deliver to stores with some minor modifications. These projects most often involved a variety of peripherals that could only be found in the Czechoslovakia with great difficulty.

This is a followup piece to an earlier article on home computers, originally discussed in a previous SN article.

posted by takyon on Wednesday April 15 2015, @10:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the surveillance-stick dept.

ArsTechnica reports that Matt Campbell, a North Little Rock attorney who represents police department whistleblowers supplied an external hard drive to the Fort Smith Police Department for them to copy emails and other evidence. When it was returned, he discovered that it contained three well-known trojan viruses:

According to court documents filed last week in the case, Campbell provided police officials with an external hard drive for them to load with e-mail and other data responding to his discovery request. When he got it back, he found something he didn't request. In a subfolder titled D:\Bales Court Order, a computer security consultant for Campbell allegedly found three well-known trojans, including:

  • Win32:Zbot-AVH[Trj], a password logger and backdoor
  • NSIS:Downloader-CC[Trj], a program that connects to attacker-controlled servers and downloads and installs additional programs, and
  • Two instances of Win32Cycbot-NF[Trj], a backdoor

All three trojans are usually easily detected by antivirus software. In an affidavit filed in the whistle-blower case, Campbell's security consultant said it's unlikely the files were copied to the hard drive by accident, given claims by Fort Smith police that department systems ran real-time AV protection.

"Additionally, the placement of these trojans, all in the same sub-folder and not in the root directory, means that [t]he trojans were not already on the external hard drive that was sent to Mr. Campbell, and were more likely placed in that folder intentionally with the goal of taking command of Mr. Campbell's computer while also stealing passwords to his accounts."

Will the Fort Smith Police Department be held accountable? Place your bets...

posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 15 2015, @08:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-compete-with-detroit dept.

Wired shares a photo gallery of abandoned spaces in NYC that should appeal to anyone who's ever watched post-apocalyptic films like "Escape from New York" or played games like "Enslaved" or "Crysis 3":

Will Ellis ignored his first “no trespassing” sign in 2012 when he ducked through the fence surrounding an old warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He started photographing the rotting interior and was immediately hooked.

“I’m not a daredevil at all, but the first time I snuck in, there was that rush of adrenaline and sense of adventure,” Ellis says. “I was also fascinated by the visuals inside. As a kid I loved all things creepy—Halloween was my favorite holiday and that’s something I never grew out of.”

From the creepy to the bizarre, Ellis’ exploration of the derelict and decrepit has lead him to document nearly 50 locations across New York City and beyond. The images chronicle forsaken schools, asylums, and forts, along with railroads and waterfronts. He updates his popular blog constantly, and a collection of 150 images has been published in Abandoned NYC.

I have had my eye on the Gowanus Batcave for years, with intentions to convert it into a real batcave. Sadly, my plans to become a billionaire have not panned out yet...

posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 15 2015, @06:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the suppresion-of-the-proletariat dept.

Analysis of a study (PDF) carried by UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education shows that isn't the poor people won't work but the work they do can't sustain them. As a blog on WaPo puts it:

We often make assumptions about people on public assistance, about the woman in the checkout line with an EBT card, or the family who lives in public housing. [...] We assume, at our most skeptical, that poor people need help above all because they haven't tried to help themselves — they haven't bothered to find work.

The reality, though, is that a tremendous share of people who rely on government programs designed for the poor in fact work — they just don't make enough at it to cover their basic living expenses. According to the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, 73 percent of people who benefit from major public assistance programs in the U.S. live in a working family where at least one adult earns the household some money.

This picture casts the culprit in a different light: Taxpayers are spending a lot of money subsidizing not people who won't work, but industries that don't pay their workers a living wage. Through these four programs alone [food stamps, Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, income supports through welfare], federal and state governments spend about $150 billion a year aiding working families, according to the analysis (the authors define people who are working here as those who worked at least 10 hours a week, at least half the year).

The workers relying the most on social programs: Fast Food (52%), Home Care (48%), Child Care (46%) and Part-time college students (25%).

posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 15 2015, @04:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-the-end-of-the-web-as-we-know-it-and-i-feel-fine dept.

Phoronix reports the Mozilla Security Engineering team is planning to make their browser useless for browsing much of the World Wide Web, by deprecating insecure HTTP.

Richard Barnes of Mozilla writes:

In order to encourage web developers to move from HTTP to HTTPS, I would like to propose establishing a deprecation plan for HTTP without security. Broadly speaking, this plan would entail limiting new features to secure contexts, followed by gradually removing legacy features from insecure contexts. Having an overall program for HTTP deprecation makes a clear statement to the web community that the time for plaintext is over -- it tells the world that the new web uses HTTPS, so if you want to use new things, you need to provide security.

See also this document outlining the initial plans.

posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 15 2015, @03:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the sand-dune-in-our-crevices dept.

ScienceDaily reports:

Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is among the most Earthlike places in the solar system. As the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft examines Titan, its discoveries bring new mysteries. One of these is that the seemingly wind-created sand dunes spotted near the moon's equator point one direction, but the near-surface winds point another direction. Astronomers may have solved this mystery.
...

Here's the problem: Climate simulations indicate that Titan's near-surface winds -- like Earth's trade winds -- blow toward the west. So why do the surface dunes, reaching a hundred yards high and many miles long, point to the east?
...

Violent methane storms high in Titan's dense atmosphere, where winds do blow toward the east, might be the answer, according to new research by University of Washington astronomer Benjamin Charnay and co-authors in a paper published today in the journal Nature Geoscience. Using computer models, Charnay, a UW post-doctoral researcher, and co-authors hypothesize that the attitude of Titan's sand dunes results from rare methane storms that produce eastward gusts much stronger than the usual westward surface winds.

Will we one day discover Titanians wind-surfing the seas of methane?

posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 15 2015, @01:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the need-more-more-moore dept.

IEEE is running a special report on "50 Years of Moore's Law" that considers "the gift that keeps on giving" from different points of view. Chris Mack begins by arguing that nothing about Moore’s Law was inevitable. "Instead, it’s a testament to hard work, human ingenuity, and the incentives of a free market. Moore’s prediction may have started out as a fairly simple observation of a young industry. But over time it became an expectation and self-fulfilling prophecy—an ongoing act of creation by engineers and companies that saw the benefits of Moore’s Law and did their best to keep it going, or else risk falling behind the competition."

Andrew Huang argues that Moore's Law is slowing and will someday stop but the death of Moore's Law will spur innovation. "Someday in the foreseeable future, you will not be able to buy a better computer next year," writes Huang. "Under such a regime, you’ll probably want to purchase things that are more nicely made to begin with. The idea of an “heirloom laptop” may sound preposterous today, but someday we may perceive our computers as cherished and useful looms to hand down to our children, much as some people today regard wristwatches or antique furniture."

Vaclav Smil writes about "Moore's Curse" and argues that there is a dark side to the revolution in electronics for it has had the unintended effect of raising expectations for technical progress. "We are assured that rapid progress will soon bring self-driving electric cars, hypersonic airplanes, individually tailored cancer cures, and instant three-dimensional printing of hearts and kidneys. We are even told it will pave the world’s transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies," writes Smil. "But the doubling time for transistor density is no guide to technical progress generally. Modern life depends on many processes that improve rather slowly, not least the production of food and energy and the transportation of people and goods."

Finally Cyrus Mody writes that it seems clear that Moore’s Law is not a law of nature in any commonly accepted sense but what kind of thing is Moore’s Law? "Moore’s Law is a human construct. As with legislation, though, most of us have little and only indirect say in its construction," writes Mody. "Everyone, both the producers and consumers of microelectronics, takes steps needed to maintain Moore’s Law, yet everyone’s experience is that they are subject to it."