The season 3 premier is upon us, people. There were a lot of quality contenders for this soundtrack slot. Mashups, covers and original tracks abound. Jason Wang's cover of the Game of Thrones theme by Ramin Djawadi is all-around solid, though, and also pretty epic. The track incorporates acoustic and electric violin, and was recorded before the start of season 2. Play this on loop when the premier is over and you're already starved for more.
I never had a walkie talkie phone, but I sure saw a lot of Nextel commercials and Sprint still offers push-to-talk even though the original Nextel network is apparently getting the ax on June 30. In the early 2000s there was something really appealing about interrupting someone's life with that little chirp. It's kind of like a phone call except different, okay? Did you ever use your phone as a wakie talkie? Do you now? Mull below.
The Mobile Blastmaster exists. That's most of what you need to know. It's the boombox of your dreams, or more probably, your nightmares. It's a little red wagon on crack.
This baby has pneumatic tires to easily traverse sand and snow. It plays from any Bluetooth-enabled device with a 30 foot range. It has a CD player, an AM/FM radio, a USB port and a 3.5mm jack. The Blastmaster has 2,000 watts powering eight tweeters, two mid-range speakers and a dual-voice coil subwoofer. And it comes in four colors.
Okay, whatever that's all fine. The real beauty here is the three cup holders, built-in bottle opener and flagpole mount. Flags are fun! If they are the American flag, obviously. The Mobile Blastmaster costs $4,000, so start saving. Everyone at your Mobile Blastmaster picnic will be blown away. Like they will leave. [Hammacher Schlemmer]
YouTube and GoogleMaps are getting the ball rolling today. According to the release above, YouTube is not actually a video viewing and sharing site, but an 8-year contest to find the best video anyone can make. And GoogleMaps now has a treasure map layer. Nice, we see what you did there. [CNET]
The Robotics and Perception Group in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Zurich is nailing it. Funded in 2012, they are studying the development of autonomous robots by making seasonal videos. Which is all anyone really wants.
In the video a Parrot AR.Drone (they're everywhere today) locates jellybean eggs that the Easter bunny has dropped out of its basket so a KUKA youBot can pick them up and return them to a crying Roboy.
This video is hilarious for a number of reasons. First of all, whose rabbit is that? Second of all, who lay on the floor to get all the bunny's-eye-view shots. Third of all, tasteful use of the Pirate's of the Caribbean theme. What a gem. [IEEE Spectrum]
There's something really meditative about these slotted lamps. They're made out of wood from California cypress trees and the light inside is a constant current LED, but the sculptural elements come through more than the utility as a lamp.
Designed by Paul Foeckler for Split Grain in LA, the lamps range from $750 to $1,950. They may not be on your IKEA shopping list, but each one requires about 100 hours of slicing and sanding so...yeah. Oh, and the smaller lamp is USB powered by computer or wall charger for some reason. Nifty. [Etsy via Colossal]
Doesn't it seem like being able to smell a TV show would be undesirable a lot of the time? Alex Trebek's cologne would be wafting around your grandma's all through Easter dinner and then your house would smell like blood after the Game of Thrones premier.
But you gotta give the people what they want, right? And somebody has been wanting to smell the screen since the early 1900s. So Japanese researchers at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology have been working on it, and debuted their "smelling screen" at the IEEE Virtual Reality conference in Orlando.
The TV is a normal LCD screen equipped with four fans that create targeted airflow by modulating their speeds. The scents come from hydrogel "aroma chips" which give off vapor when heated, and the TV is supposed to give the overall impression that smells are emanating from their corresponding object on screen, like a cake or an infected stab wound.
If it really works, the technology would still face pretty major implementation challenges, but at least it would be a smell-o-vision technology that, you know, works. People just won't rest until this one is checked off the bucket list. [The Verge]
Yesterday I was printing a form and I realized it was the first time I had printed anything in months. For awhile I was the one who still had a paper copy of my bus ticket, Fandango confirmation, even driving directions. But yesterday I realized that my printer was covered in dust and stocked with ink and paper because I don't really use it anymore. I'm not someone who made a huge effort to be all digital, I just hit a tipping point. Where are you in the transition to paperless? How are things at your office? Ponder below.
We probably all vaguely assume that computers will overthrow us someday, which may be why it's so unsettling to learn that computer code is evolving much like genetic code. By comparing bacterial genomes to Linux, researchers have found "survival of the fittest" acting in computer programming.
Sergei Maslov of Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University grad student Tin Yau Pang looked at how different components in genomes and computer code survive. They noted that in both examples of complex systems, prevalent constituent parts become widespread by being so integral that they can't be removed. And they do this by contributing to reproduction, either directly or through expansions that make reproduction possible.
It makes sense that the more a gene or a specific program is used, the more future developments will depend on it as a given, but the surprising part is the similarity in frequency of use between important genes and computer programs. Maslov and Pang looked at 500 bacterial species and 2 million individual computers. They found that the frequency of certain genetic code being used in life-sustaining bacterial processes was extremely close to the frequency of installation of 200,000 Linux packages. Maslov explains:
We found that we can determine the number of crucial components – those without which other components couldn't function – by a simple calculation that holds true both in biological systems and computer systems . . . Bacteria are the ultimate BitTorrents of biology.
You find the number of key parts by taking the square root of the dependent components. But Maslov points out that this only holds for open source code, where evolution happens "naturally." Okay, definitely thinking our universe is a computer simulation now. [Brookhaven National Lab via PhysOrg]
Image credit: Shutterstock/isak55
This is actually a pretty great thought experiment. At first it might seem kind of pointless to talk about what would happen if the sun vanished, but it doesn't actually result in the immediate destruction of everything. Which is weird. Vsauce walks through a pretty nuanced description of how earth's natural systems would slowly fail, but over weeks and even years, not seconds. The cold would get us in the end, but extremophiles that live in deep sea volcanoes and thermal vents could survive for billions of years. If you're not heliocentric and human-centric things don't look so bleak. [Vsauce]
The world's fastest supercomputer isn't the world's fastest super computer anymore, so it's getting turned off today. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, IBM's Roadrunner is being replaced by a faster, cheaper and more energy efficient computer, Cielo.
The $121 million Roadrunner supercomputer was the first to consistently compute a Petaflop, or a quadrillion mathematical calculations per second, beginning in 2008 and this power has aided research into lasers, viruses, weapons, cosmology and more. Roadrunner takes up 6,000 square feet, uses 278 racks to house its processors and is connected by 55 miles of fiber optic cable.
After the switch is flipped, researchers at Los Alamos will spend a month testing Roadrunner's operating system memory compression and data routing. Cheaper, smaller and all-around better supercomputers are, of course, in the works at IBM and elsewhere, but as of its decommissioning today Roadrunner is still in the top 25 fastest supercomputers in the world. Respect. [Los Alamos National Laboratory]
Innovation in newspaper delivery techniques hasn't really seemed like a priority in awhile because of the whole death of print thing and whatever. But since drones categorically improve all situations, a local French postal service is turning paper routes into air routes.
The postal service "La Poste Groupe" is using Auvergne, France as a test province for a new drone delivery program that will employ Parrot quadricopters to deliver local papers. Tests officially begin in May and will consist of 20 drones being controlled by 20 postal workers from iOS or Android devices. The goal is for the system to be ready for 7am deliveries.
The program faces problems with battery life and range, because the quadricopters only have a range of about 164 feet and 30 minutes of flight time. No word on whether privacy concerns are being viewed as...a concern. [La Poste via VentureBeat]
Hahahaha, your Shaolin Rooster style is most impressive. But it is no match! For my Little Bunny Wu Shu! *lips keeps moving* [Crush]
Thanks to the crazy prevalence of dash-cams in Russia, we got an amazing, multi-viewpoint look at last month's monster meteor strike just hours after it happened. But there's more to see than just the flashes in the sky. PBS's Nova dug in deep to figure out the details of the incident, and the disaster it could have been. The disaster it might be next time if we don't keep a close watch on the skies.
Tune in below to learn the details, and rest assured that there's no world-ending asteroid hurtling at the Earth, putting it in any super immediate danger. At least, not yet. [h/t David Pogue]
Watch Meteor Strike on PBS. See more from NOVA.
Unfortunately, it looks like this is region-locked to the US. Sorry everybody else. But if you know of somewhere else to see it or have any tricks up your sleeve, please drop it in the discussion below.
It's always good to have some tunes on tap that sound their best at ear-shattering volumes, and if you're in the market, Nine Inch Nail's "The Day the World Went Away" deserves a spot at the top of the list. .
Off the "band"'s 1999 classic The Fragile, the perplexingly titled "The Day the Whole World Went Away" is an amazing soundscape complete with walls of distortion that dip in and out for a slick contrast of mellow crooning. You know, Nine Inch Nails. Though not one of Reznor's most well-known hits (at least not in my experience; a mix of it was in Terminator Salvation apparently), the song boasts one of the better "na na na na na" breaks out there, and can fill a room wonderfully with crashing waves of sound. What I'm saying is that it's good. Just listen.
This particular video has it mashed up with public domain video of an atomic bomb test for a fitting—chilling—visual component, and if you like what you hear, there are like a bajillion different mixes out there. It might not be your first stop for NIN, but it's a good one worth enjoying at full volume. [Spotify, Amazon, iTunes]
An expensive, ornate vase can be as much of a centerpiece as the flowers that are in it. These floating vases designed by the Japanese group oodesign take things in the opposite direction by making them look like water ripples.
The vases themselves are just discs of clear plastic, but the design idea behind them is elegantly simple. Intended to look like ripples of water, the discs will float in any body of water (or whathaveyou) you put them in, and let a single flower balance delicately inside of it, with the stem poking out the bottom. The result is what seems—at a glance, at least—to be straight-up magic.
Not all of us have vats of water or decorative ponds just laying around, but just one floating ripple vase and a glass makes for a vase that's far more interesting than anything you could pick up at an antique store. The vases are available through oodesign's store for the equivalent of about 10 dollars. Hopefully they'll bob up to the surface somewhere a little more accessible soon. [Designboom]
Vaccines beef up your immune system by giving it a little taste of a weak—but still alive—version of diseases. Now researchers in the UK have developed an alternative approach: rip out a virus's insides and let your body crush its hollow husk.
Not technically viruses but rather virus-like particles, the vaccine developed by researchers from the U.K. National Institute for Biological Standards and Control will stimulate the body's defense mechanism but can never, ever reproduce. So far they've just been messing with foot and mouth disease—which tends to afflict livestock—but the same technique could eventually be applied to the related polio virus and maybe others in the future.
So far, the results of this tinkering haven't been widely tested. The modified suckers have only been put to work on a total of eight cows, but five of them showed immunity after tackling the little zombie invaders. Regardless of whether there are any really wide-ranging human applications for the tech, it's still awesome to know that scientists are able to turn viruses into tiny zombies. And ones that do good, no less. [Popular Science]
What with cloud storage becoming more and more affordable, chances are you've got a stack of old hard drives just laying around somewhere. At least one. You could just throw them away, or leave them to languish, or you could throw caution to the wind and make one into a cotton candy machine. Just in time for Easter.
It's not even that complicated either, according to the Chinese engineer who pioneered the practice. Sure, it requires some tinkering, but as for materials you just need a hard drive that can turn on, a plastic bowl, a soda can, a metal disc of some sort (like a can lid), and six bike spokes. From there it's just the process of hooking them all together like some kind of diabetic MacGyver.
Chances are this isn't the best cotton candy. It might not be fit to eat. But let's face it, you probably aren't going to do this. Instead you'll let your family of hard drives continue to make their own dust-flavored fuzz in a shoebox in the closet, but the important thing is knowing that you could do it if you really wanted to. So maybe you ought to keep holding on to those suckers, just in case of a cotton candy emergency. [M.I.C. Gadget via Hack a Day]
Public transit doesn't have to be a total bummer if you've got a nice enough hub for it all to connect to. That seems to be the logic behind the upcoming 1.5-million-square-foot, San Francisco Transbay Transit Center. Some are calling it the city' "Grand Central," and if it lives up to the plans, it'll certainly be grand.
Designed by Cesar Pelli, and his office, Pelli Clarke Pelli, the gorgeous hub is still in its earliest construction phase, but new renderings are giving a peek into its potential awesomeness. The sprawling complex will take up three city blocks on its completion, and stand three stories tall. It's top will feature a 5.4-acre roof park designed by PWP Landscape Architecture, and three enormous skylights that bring some sun down to even the deepest levels of the structure. Mixed in with the greenery, the Transbay Hub will boast a wide variety hangout spaces like cafes, a playground, and even an amphitheater, even cycling lanes.
Between the greenery above and the BART trains below, is a wealth of stunning design. The hub's guts are composed of a beautifully simple, white framework and all the enormous windows you could ever hope for. It's certainly a more modern take on the classic transit hot-spots it aims to rival in scope, and the new renderings make it look flat-out futuristic. Trains won't start pulling up until 2017, but in the meantime we can dream of how great it would be if all public transit looked this good. Let's just hope they can manage to keep it looking clean and pristine. [Co.Design]
We all use computers every day, but at some moment in each of our lives, there was that first meeting. A first interface, if you will. You might not remember the real first time you used a computer, but there's got to be one shining gem of nostalgia that sticks out in your mind. What is it? When you look back on it now, is it laughable or just plain awesome? What was your first time like?
Image by Fer Gregory/Shutterstock
While there may not have actually been a Internet-threatening DDoS this week, there's plenty more to catch up on. We've got soda-stealin' tips, two flavors of photoshop magic, the reason you'll wind up with a smart watch, Bill Gates' condom plans, and all the people who suddenly owe Google $1,500. Check it all out below.
Awesome Accountant Made an Entire RPG Game Inside Microsoft ExcelEvery accountant I know swears by the powers of Excel. But not every accountant can harness that power as beautifully as Cary Walkin, an accountant from Canada. Walkin made a full RPG game inside Excel. As in you can use Excel to actually have fun. More »
How to Get a Can of Soda for Free from a Vending MachineIf you're ever thirsty for delicious carbonated sugar syrup and find yourself without any cash or quarters, maybe you'll be wise enough to carry around a measuring tape with you. Turns out, the wild minds of Russia have developed a slick vending machine hack that'll give you free sodas. And it only takes just a little bit of force. Here's how they do it. More »
Watch This Photoshop Jedi Turn a 16-Bit Super Metroid Screenshot Into a Stunning High-Res MasterpiecePhotoshop savant and Deviant Art member Elemental79 is back with another mind-blowing timelapse as he turns a screenshot from the 1994 16-bit classic Super Metroid into a high-res work of art. More »
Why You'll End Up Wearing a Smart WatchPeople don't wear watches anymore. You'll look ridiculous. Why wouldn't you just use your smartphone instead? These are just some of the negative sentiments skeptics are spewing about smart watches, which are still very much in their nascent stage. Guess what? They're wrong. More »
These Exploding Droplets of Glass Are a Bewildering Quirk of PhysicsMaking a Prince Albert's Rupert's drop is easy; you just let some molten glass drip into a bucket of water. But the resulting structure is so much more complex than the process that made it. The guys over at SmarterEveryDay took an in-depth look to explain why part of it can't be destroyed with a hammer, while its other half explodes with the slightest nick. More »
Watch Pepper Potts Finally Suit Up in This Kickass Iron Man 3 TeaserAs May 3 gets closer and closer Marvel is starting to flood the airwaves with 30 second Iron Man 3 commercials, including this spot which reveals something fans have speculated since the first trailer: Pepper Potts gets to don the Iron Man armor. It doesn't look like Stark has created her her own custom suit-yet-but she looks right at home in his armor. Talk about a power couple More »
Bill Gates Has $100,000 For Anyone Who Can Invent a High-Tech, Next-Gen CondomCondoms are a life-saving piece of tech, and for being little more than uninflated latex balloons, they do their job pretty well if you wear them. That's the part that Bill Gates is working on. No, he's not going around as a one-man condom-police army, but he is offering $100,000 to anyone who can make a condom less of a bummer to wear. More »
That Internet War Apocalypse Is a LieYou might've read some headlines today-in very reputable publications-saying that there's an online attack underway. The biggest in history. Enough to slow down the internet. This would be exciting and scary, except it's just not true. More »
Meet the Lucky People Who Suddenly Owe Google $1500We already know the first, lucky six who have the honor of paying Google $1,500 in exchange for Glass and the adventures and general ridicule that will follow. But now, @projectglass is in the process of announcing the rest of the lucky winners by replying individually to each of their past #ifihadglass tweets. Here's a sampling of the trailblazers in all their glory. There will be 8,000 in total. More »
North Korea Photoshopped Its Hovercraft Fleet To Make It Look Less Terrible and SadThere's nothing like a little Photoshop touch-up to make your navy look like more toned, suppled, and fearsome than it ever really could be. First Iran used a little editing magic to put its jets "in the air" and now North Korea is getting in on the fun as well. A glamour shot of the nation's recent hovercraft exercise shows a couple of its models looking suspiciously similar. More »
When Google started its Glass-giving spree, it picked out some odd picks. It got so bad that some of those offers got pulled. But you can bet these celebrity winners will get their copies.
Stanford computer science student Andrej Karpathy put together a handy-dandy script that trawls Twitter and spits out the winners in order of their follower counts. And man, some of them are pretty random.
It's not that these picks don't make any sense; a few of these guys have cool ideas. They just aren't folks you'd tend to think of as developers or beta testers, or even necessarily techies.
NYMag says that the winners are being picked by an outside firm, so it really could be that some of these folks were picked out of a hat, or maybe just chosen by follower count. And it's not over yet either; Google says it'll give a heads up when it's done handing them out. But it looks like some of the most puzzling explorers have already been tapped.
Soulja Boy, you guys. Soulja Boy. [Andrej Karpathy via BeatBeat]
We've got some pretty tall mountains here on Earth. Granted, even the best of 'em don't hold a candle to what's waiting on Mars, but they're still impressive. Just look at the views Google got with its Street Mountain View shots.
But how tall could a mountain on Earth actually be, under the most perfect conditions? Henry Reich of MinutePhysics and now MinuteEarth digs in, or should we say summits? Suffice it to say the wildests peaks out there aren't here at home, but until you've climbed Everest, you're in no place to complain. [MinuteEarth]
You've just sat down to a nice home-cooked meal with your family when the phone rings. Could be Grandma, you think. She still actually uses the phone for talking. But no, it's a robocall shilling for some debt relief scam, the fifth in as many days.
You know what? You don't have to put up with it. Here's how to hang up on telemarketers and their mechanical minions. For good.
Unsolicited telemarketing calls have long been a bane of modern life, interrupting evenings with offers of insurance, extended warranties, credit counseling, and a litany of other expensive services that you never needed or asked for. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which has governance over landline communications, thought it had fixed the problem in September, 2009, when the agency revised its Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR), banning the use of prerecorded commercial telemarketing calls, aka robocalls, to consumers who have not provided permission previously and in writing. Telemarketers face penalties up to $16,000 per call if caught.
"American consumers have made it crystal clear that few things annoy them more than the billions of commercial telemarketing robocalls they receive every year," said Jon Leibowitz, Chairman of the FTC, said at the start of the program. "Starting September 1, this bombardment of prerecorded pitches, senseless solicitations, and malicious marketing will be illegal."
The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates cellphone lines, has also tightened its regulations regarding robocalls by eliminating a number of loopholes in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991. Previously, businesses simply needed an "established business relationship" to call you mercilessly. Now, the TCPA amendments regulate the volume and types of prerecorded solicitations that may delivered to a land line phone as well as every auto-dialed call, prerecorded or not, and automated texts to cell phones, emergency numbers, and hospital rooms.
The only exceptions to this rule are political calls to land lines (the cost of picking one's political party when renewing your driver's license), purely informational messages like school lock downs, flight cancellations, and emergency weather alerts, and those from companies that you've given written permission. For example, if you've signed up for a checking account, your bank used to be able to legally harass you with insurance offers or other services. Now, though, they must have your written authorization before bugging you (which is why many bury that authorization deep in their Terms of Service). For cell phones, the rules are even more strict: no robocalls or automated text messages, political or not, are permitted without written consent. The two agencies also joined forces to create the National Do Not Call registry, a database of people who have actively opted out of receiving telemarketing calls by which legitimate telemarketers must abide.
While these enhanced rules are definitely a step in the right direction, unfortunately they're no match for modern technology, which can spam-dial thousands of phones every minute, and the unscrupulous scammers that use them, who honestly couldn't care less about interrupting your meal much less some $16,000 ticket from the government. Rampant doesn't begin to encapsulate the severity of this problem.
"Too many telemarketers, aided by autodialers and prerecorded messages, have continued to call consumers who don't want to hear from them," said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski at an FCC meeting last February. During the 2012 fiscal year nearly four million Americans contacted the FTC to complain about robocalls—a 70 percent jump over the previous year—and that's only the folks that knew about the DNC registry. The two agencies even went so far as to create the $50,000 Robocall Challange, a public competition seeking actionable methods for fighting these phone spammers.
So what do you do when you pick up the phone with a synthetic voice on the other end? "Our advice is straightforward. Hang up," Lois Greisman, director of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Marketing Practices Division, told CNN. "There are virtually no legitimate marketers trying to reach you to sell you something using a prerecorded call."
Just hang up. Don't press 1 to speak with a live operator, don't even speak. Just put the phone down and slowly back away from the receiver. Once you've hung up, log on to the Do Not Call registry and register your home and cell phone numbers. This won't eliminate robocalls entirely—companies that already have your permission are exempted, for instance—but it will certainly reduce the volume of these calls. To date, more nearly 220 million Americans have signed up. You can also call the FTC's complaint line at 1-888-382-1222 or on the DNC website.
Also, start reading the Terms of Service for any new program or offer your apply for. You'll likely have to agree to the telemarketing in order to get that loan/credit report/hoagie-of-the-month club membership you want but you'll at least be able to better track who has your permission to bug you. You can also ask your ph0one carrier to block the offending number, so long as the carrier doesn't charge for the service as robocallers frequently change or spoof their originating numbers.
If simply hanging up and hoping the telemarketers don't call back isn't quite your style, take a lesson from Alex Rodriguez. This 24-year-old put his experience as a Linux systems admin to use by integrating a Rasberry Pi into an analog receiver to create the "banana phone." In this system, incoming callers must punch in a four digit verification number to prove they're human. If they are, the number is stored in a whitelist of phone numbers so that friends and family can reach him immediately. Autodialers on the other hand, with their distinct lack of dialing fingers, are shunted immediately to voicemail. What's more, the system is hardware agnostic and can be integrated with any existing landline or VOIP setup.
Rodriguez's banana phone is one of a multitude of home-brew solutions currently vying for the Robocall Challenge's $50,000 purse. This is definitely a step in the right direction. However, as with digital spam, one step is never enough. As technology progresses, an arms race between scammers looking for new and inventive ways to reach your ears and public-private efforts to shore up home phone defense seems inevitable. There likely will never be a single magic bullet solution to this problem, just as email spam (and the unsolicited Yellow Pages deliveries before them) depend on a plethora of imperfect checks and filters. But if you do, the FTC has 50,000 reasons for you to speak up.
[Do Not Call - FTC 1, 2, 3, 4 - FCC 1, 2 - Ars Technica - CNN - MSN - wavebreakmedia & SFC / Shutterstock]
Star Trek is every thing we hope space travel can be someday. Maybe we could do without all the universe-threatening disasters, but we're all hoping for a warp drive, or a tricorder, or a replicator. Until then, NASA is carrying the fire, and the 30-second NASA trailer that will play before Star Trek: Into Darkness aims to get you stoked about our current day, real-life Starfleet.
The ad-buy is the result of an Indiegogo campaign that was successfully funded just this morning. Using the $30,000 dollars raised, the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) will take a little three-minute film NASA released last year entitled "We Are Explorers," boil it down to 30 seconds, and buy time for it to run before showings of Star Trek: Into Darkness in a whole bunch of theaters across major US markets when the film opens.
The AIA sums up the campaign's goal this way:
By backing this 30 second trailer in the top movie theater markets around the United States, you can show our students and young people that we're in an exciting new era of space exploration. Now is the time to reach them - to remind them that an inspiring space program awaits, one that is worthy of their ambition.
Hopefully it has the awe-inspiring effect intended, we can't possibly have too many people interested in awesome space stuff. [Indiegogo via The Verge]
It's a common little meta-game for those of us who are technically competent: keep your eye out in the movies for the most egregious technical misrepresentation you can find. And while its one thing to just keep tossing of reference after reference to "the mainframe," this complication of hacktastic scenes put together by the folks at Hack a Day is particularly cringe-worthy.
Someday, maybe there'll be a real true-to-life, tech-friendly hacker montage. But then again, that'd probably be impossible to watch, except maybe in time-lapse. [Hack a Day]
If you want to take a peek at the set of the movie Surviving Humanity, here it is. If you're wondering what the heck Surviving Humanity is about, don't worry. It's fantastic. It's a sci-fi porno that stars James Deen, Sinn Sage and Andy Sand Dimas.
The wonderful guys at Topless Robot took a trip out to a nondescript building in Porn Valley to see what a sci-fi porno set looks like and not surprisingly, it's just like most movies. If most movies had scenes with hardcore sex involved, that is. There is a green screen though! And cheap looking set pieces! And pretty girls!
The movie will first be released as Rated R (no sex) and then fulfill its destiny as a porno on DVD a few weeks after. Topless Robot talked to the movie's producer who talked about the plot and said:
You have a heroine from each of these four time zones. There's prehistoric man, the caveman era, then the 1950s, then you've got the world of today, and then you've got this bleak future where sex is not allowed between humans; humans are cloned as adults and terminated as adults when their economic utility is done. We have an overarching message with this movie that maybe we're losing some of the elements that make us human, and if we continue down this path, we might end up in this bleak world that's run by corporations.
Sounds fun enough! But what is fun is Topless Robot's report on the whole visit. It's a fun little read about how the porn world balances the film world. Check it out. [Topless Robot]
Think Silly Putty is just fun and games? Not always! Just watch this magnetic putty completely devour a rare-earth magnet. It's not as instantaneous as this time-lapse video makes it seem but it still ends up engulfing the entire magnet.
The video, which was shot over an hour and a half in 3FPS but played at 24FPS, shows the swallowing process of the putty but doesn't show how eventually the magnet will be surrounded by an even distribution of the putty. There's no way out! Scott Lawson describes the puttys' properties:
Ferromagnetic particles in the putty are strongly attracted to the magnet and very slowly engulf the surface of the magnet. The magnet shown in the picture is a strong neodymium iron boron magnet. It's a very powerful magnet for its size and could erase magnetic stripes found in credit cards and damage electronics!
The putty looks and feels like regular silly putty, but the difference lies in the fact that it has been infused with millions of micron-sized ferrous particles (most often iron oxide powder). The magnetic putty is not actually magnetic by itself, since the infused particles are made of iron powder.
The cube magnetizes the ferromagnetic particles in the putty and cause the ferrous particles to align with each other to create north and south magnetic poles, making the putty become a magnet. The magnet effect is only temporary (but obviously long enough to swallow the magnet) until "thermal agitation shakes the particles" and they lose their Magneto powers. [Scott Lawson]
Here's a fun little cooking trick for you to try: scramble eggs inside its shell so that you can make scrambled hard boiled eggs. Meaning the entire egg will be perfectly golden all around. Delicious!
All it requires is a long sleeve T-shirt (or pair of stockings, etc.) and two rubber bands (or rope, etc.). Just tie up the egg so it sits safely inside the sleeve and wind it up while pulling. You're basically shaking the living snuff out of the egg so it all mixes gloriously. WonderHowTo says an easy way to tell if you've shaken the egg enough is to take it to a dark room and light it up with a flashlight.
What you want is the egg to look red under the light. If it's still yellow, it's not scrambled enough. I'm trying this tomorrow morning! [Nighthawkinlight]