Step one: bring your iMac to a Panera Bread. Step two: play WoW on it. Step three: be old. Step four: win the unconditional respect of the entire internet, forever. UPDATE: This appears to be a habit.
[Reddit]
Cocaine and heroin are generally acknowledged to be fairly dangerous chemicals to put in your body. And that’s not even considering that cocaine could well be tainted with opossum de-worming medication and heroin may be laced with anthrax—that’s right, anthrax.
Yes, it’s been a week of dangerous and deadly adulterants showing up in recreational drugs. DISCOVER actually highlighted the story of the tainted cocaine back in September, when the Drug Enforcement Agency first announced that they had found cocaine tainted with levamisole. The drug is used to treat cancer in humans and as a de-worming agent in livestock, but can have dire effects on the immune system. Just how it got into cocaine nobody knows for sure, though scientists think it may spark a more intense high for users.
Today, the Centers for Disease Control has published a report documenting levamisole in cocaine in four states; the organization found 21 cases and one death. The DEA suggests that nearly 70 percent of cocaine coming into the U.S. contains levamisole, and the CDC acknowledges that there were probably many more illnesses in the states it studied that went unreported, as tends to happen with highly illegal drugs.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, at least two heroin users appear to have died from anthrax. Again, the authorities are trying to get the message out to heroin users through the news media, though they’re not sure exactly how the problem came to be. From The Guardian:
“It’s highly conceivable that it could have been contaminated either from the source in the [heroin's] origin country or it could have been contaminated as a consequence of subsequent cutting when it arrived in this country,” said Dr Colin Ramsay, of Health Protection Scotland.
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80beats: To Help Heroin Addicts, Give Them… Prescription Heroin?
Image: iStockphoto
Most of us already know that it's NOT socially acceptable to talk during a movie. But to those of us who weren't born in a barn, these rude movie-goers are still a constant burden. It's time to fight back, dirty.
With Avatar in theaters, the stakes are simply too high to risk losing a film to some pudgy fat boy film school drop out who is convinced his personal commentary is just as important as the countless hours of work that have gone into the filmmaking process.
The following are a list of rules and responses that I feel, as a society, we need to deem socially acceptable to assimilate into our communal fabric.
6-Inch Voices, Or Group Humiliation
I know I'm coming off rude already. The occasional quiet comment to the person beside you, that's totally fine by me. But If I can hear you from over two seats away, chances are, you need to shut the fuck up (throughout life, possibly, but definitely in the theater). If a person makes loud comments that a single "shhh" doesn't thwart, everyone around them should stand, point and loudly ask them to leave (with liberal use of expletives). It'll be a painful, distracting experience, but chances are, it won't be needed again.
Really, It's OK To Tell People to Shut Up
I know I just made this point, but I want to make it abundantly clear: telling talkers to shut up is OK. You are doing all of the shy, weak and first daters who want to enjoy a movie but not lose out on a potential post-film grope a huge favor. Let's just make an oath, right now, to support one another against the talkers, be they intimidatingly muscley or not. Let's acknowledge a silent brotherhood, poised to attack at the slightest breach of conduct.
If You Pull Out a Cellphone During a Movie, You Relinquish All Rights to It
I don't care if you have it's on vibrate or turned to silent. Any cellphone pulled from a pocket during a movie—most probably a Sidekick—that's glowing in the corner of the entire audience's eye is now communal property. It can and should be yanked from the offender's hand and chucked across the room to break against the nearest hard surface. The offender's head is one such potential surface.
Bathroom Exits, OK, Refills, Not OK
We've all overestimated the endurance of our bladders. And as you grow older, you realize that uncontrollable bodily functions are something we all just need to be adults about. If someone walks out during a pivotal scene because they NEED to go, well, that's alright. But if they take their empty popcorn bucket with them, proceed with skepticism. Do they look like they needed to use the bathroom while they were up? No? Then tripping them on the way back is totally Kosher.
Honor Those Who Watch Credits
In the theater, credits are part of the film. It's your option to watch them, but should you elect not to, do not disturb those around you who enjoy finishing a film by celebrating all those who made it possible. That means, no standing in front of someone seated to finish the credits (a quick, polite pass is OK). And maybe save that thing you NEED to say for the hallway or the parking lot, rather than voice it right as the film fades to black. Offenses in this realm will not elicit punishment, but you may be deemed "tacky."
Oh, But None Of This Applies to Kids Movies on a Tuesday Afternoon
Once again, I'm not an evil or malicious person (by nature). If you're watching some Shrek sequel, especially during a matinee, pretty much anything goes—for children. Adults who are offending any of the above rules in ways not directly resulting from or related to a child's actions are fair game for fair punishment.
And if you have any points or suggestions that I may have missed, please, please, please list them in the comments. Two people can easily drop $40 and and a free evening to see a movie. And the first time you watch something truly special can never be rekindled.
Let's band together and see to it that movie talkers STFU for good.
Scribd, the YouTube for print, is working on a new way to get e-books onto your Kindle without buying them from Amazon.
Right now, to get one of the tens of millions of Scribd documents has — books, papers, and other content — off the web and into a Kindle, a user has to email the document to his or her Kindle email address.
Trip Adler, the company's CEO and founder tells us it will be a "seamless" experience next year.
Trip couldn't tell us if his plan was part of an official Scribd-Amazon partnership or not. He just said, "I can tell you that we talk to Amazon a lot."
Will Scribd-To-Kindle be a threat to Amazon?
For now, Scribd's store is no threat to Amazon. It's a smaller selection more heavily favoring obscure documents Amazon doesn't sell. Down the road, it represents a possible threat.
That's because Scribd is quietly developing a strong e-book storefront to match its hoard of user generated content.
This week Scribd announced that John Wiley and Sons would be selling books through Scribd's store.That gives Scribd access to the "For Dummies" series, as well as "Frommer's" travel guides. It already had Simon and Schuster on board, along with other prominent publishers.
If Scribd can put its books on the Kindle, this number should only grow, especially since it offers publishers a better business deal than Amazon.
Amazon reportedly offers a 50/50 sales split. Scribd only keeps 20% and allows publishers to set their own price.
Is this a Hail Mary for Scribd?
No. Regardless of what happens, Scribd will keep chugging along. It plans on rolling out mobile applications next year for the iPhone and Android.
Adler declined to give us a revenue number, but he said the company was profitable in the second quarter this year, but decided to hire more employees to focus on growth. It has about 40 employees.
Our back of the envelop calculations put revenue in the range of $7 to $10 million. Adler says revenue is growing 10-12% month over month.
image: Flickr/Jamesjyu
A new study shows the top 100 search terms kids used in 2009, and whoo boy are we all in trouble.
"Youtube" is the winner across all age groups, with Facebook and Google rounding out the top three. In the four hole, the teens and the tweens are both searching for "sex," which is just good life practice. But kids seven and under apparently prefer to skip the formalities and search for straight-up porn. That's more than Club Penguin, more than the Cartoon Network, and way more than Hannah Montana.
So three thoughts from this.
One: Hey, kids, stop searching for Google. It doesn't make any sense.
Two: I believe the children are our future.
Three: Our future is doomed. [Symantec via CNET]
Are planes your last refuge from this horrible, awful internet? Or are they terrifying airborne isolation chambers, which pose a dire threat to your carefully regimented Tweeting schedule? Either way, don't buy a ticket without consulting this chart. [Jaunted]
So I am beginning the last year of my Electrical/Electronic Engineering Undergrad next spring and I must register for next semester's courses. The available courses are all fairly specialized graduate courses but I want to take a variety of courses to keep as many employment options open as possibl
A bunch of folks have let me know about a new video that starts in the Himalayas and accelerates you out to the edge of the Universe, and then back again. It’s done by the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, and was directed by data visualization expert Carter Emmart. Make sure you click the high-def button!
Cooooool. I’d love to see this in the AMNH planetarium. That place rocks.
Fiji is experiencing an upswing in tourism as new flights into Nadi proliferate. In September 2009 Fiji received 54,981 visitors, an increase of 4.5 percent over September 2008.
Astrophysics tells us that not only is the universe expanding, but that it is accelerating, due to the effect of Dark Energy which is said to comprise 74% of the mass of the universe. With unbridled acceleration, we are told that our view of galaxies will start to "blink out" in time as they reach t
Hi,
In ADRE,
Could someone please tell me what are these kind of vibrations and how do they differ from each other?
Thank you very much.
I don't know what the bloody hell is going on with Great Britain and their stolen government laptops—sixty-six so far this year, 658 in four years—but it's getting absurdly ridiculous. The last case, however, is really serious:
This has the potential to become one of the most serious security breaches at the Ministry for a very long time. An investigation by [the Ministry of Defense] police is ongoing and it would be inappropriate to comment further.
The laptop —which belonged to a RAF officer—was stolen right at the Ministry of Defense's headquarters, along with a USB encryption key that would unlock all the files in the computer. Apparently, this is so serious that there is a huge search going on in London right now, with the police, the military, the secret service, Sean Connery, the manufacturers of Marmite, the Queen, most of the personnel at the Ministry of Silly Walks, and Jones the Dog hunting for it. [Defense Tech]
This is a little longwinded and I will try and fully explain the situation so please bear with me.
I am in Iraq, our living accommodation and shower/toilet units are CHU's (containerised housing units)
Where possible we use 5 wire systems for all CHU's
The electrical installations are
Behold, the West Mata ocean volcano eruption:
Over 50 hours (!) of hi-def footage was captured of this western Pacific ocean volcano, which is 1,200 meters underwater, by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV)—named Jason—from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The footage was unveiled recently at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
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Video: NSF & NOAA via YouTube / djxatlanta
They're chopsticks. They're a spoon. They're a massive mess waiting to happen. Spoon Chopsticks! Yeah! [Yanko via DVICE]
Hot on the heels of the story of lab-built red blood cells that DISCOVER covered on Tuesday, a different team of scientists have announced another step forward. Bioengineer Erin Lavik announced that her team built synthetic platelets that, when given intravenously to rodents, could slow their bleeding after a cut. The study appears in Science Translational Medicine.
Your normal platelets exist in the bloodstream and use proteins to bind together and close off the bleeding when you get a cut. Lavik’s synthetic version is a nanoparticle that her team injected into the rodents intravenously. The synthetic platelets augment this process, bonding with natural blood platelets and acting as a nanostructure boosting the natural platelets’ ability to form a solid barrier that stops bleeding [Popular Science]. The rodents with synthetic platelets stopped bleeding 23 percent faster than those without.
Lavik’s particle is a third the size of a natural platelet, and the team was careful not to make it too sticky. “There’s a balance between the two edges of the sword–bleeding too much and clotting too much,” says Mortimer Poncz, a physician at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the research. “You don’t want to stop bleeding in the leg but die of a heart attack or have stroke” [Technology Review].
The scientists now must do pig and then human tests to determine the platelets’ effectiveness in people. So it would take years before synthetics nanoparticles are slowing the bleeding for accident or battlefield trauma victims. Lavik, though, is hopeful can be just as helpful for humans. “All we’re doing is leveraging what biology does naturally,” Lavik said [Bloomberg].
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Image: Science/AAAS
As our Avatar review illustrated, 3D is evolving from a mere gimmick to a technology that is poised to be the center of our home entertainment experience. And those cheezy glasses? Expect them to get a lot more sophisticated.
If XpanD, the company behind the 3D glasses for Avatar is anything to go by, the price of fancy shutter glasses will start at around $70 a pair, and top out at around $150. XpanD claims that two pairs of their glasses will be bundled with 3D sets from Panasonic, LG, Sony and Vizio due out next year. The additional costs kick in when you need to buy extra pairs.
The mock up above is just a glimpse of what XpanD has planned, but rest assured, you will probably look like an idiot until technologies that don't require glasses come into their own. [DVICE]
A Newsweek writer better known as Fake Steve Jobs is so fed up with AT&T’s service for his iPhone that he’s calling on his fellow AT&T customers to clog up the 3G wireless network today in protest of AT&T’s plan to impose service fees on “bandwidth hogs.”
According to the Inquirer:
Dan Lyons, blogging as Fake Steve Jobs, has called on AT&T users to show their service dissatisfaction by trying to overwhelm the network with data-intensive tasks. “Operation Chokehold”, as he called his incitement to flash-mob mischief, hopes to shut down the US AT&T 3G network at 3pm today and appears to have gained some support from the iPhone rabble.
Thousands have pledged their support for Operation Chokehold (on Facebook, so take that as you will). However most tech blogs are calling Lyons and his protesters jerks for attempting to disrupt service. The FCC and AT&T are calling the stunt irresponsible because it would be an intentional disruption to AT&T’s 80 million customers. However, a disruption, if one even happens, wouldn’t affect voice service, so the claim that 911 calls would be blocked isn’t true.
Some blogs don’t think anyone will participate outside of New York and San Francisco, but if the thousands do materialize, and the network is bumped off-line, the Inquirer speculates that Lyons could face legal trouble for inciting the stunt.
Just to play it safe, if you need to use any of your amazing iPhone apps to access the internet, you might want to do it before 3 p.m. today.
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Image: flickr / William Hook
Over at Mother Jones’ blog “Blue Marble,” I’ve got a post/essay on a topic that I started thinking about after my Wednesday night panel with the Guardian’s George Monbiot in Copenhagen–namely, why is there suddenly a new surge of climate denial? The post starts like this:
George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and global warming author who combines pugilistic defenses of climate science with Monty Pythonesque levity, is struck by a paradox at the heart of the attempt to achieve action here in Copenhagen. For, as he put it to a full room last night at a panel hosted by the Danish science magazine FORSKERForum, “In the past year, there has been a massive upsurge in climate change denial in the United States, even as the science gets stronger.”
Opinion polls certainly support Monbiot’s contention. According to results released in October by the Pew Research Center, considerably fewer Americans now believe the Earth is warming (the decline has been from 71 percent to 57 percent over the space of a year and a half). And as for agreement with scientists about the cause of global warming—human activities, human emissions—that too has sloped downwards, to just 36 percent today.
How is this possible?
Keep reading here for Monbiot’s, and my, answer.
One lucky guy in the UK found himself on the receiving end of a very cool Nokia promotion, where he had to hack open a PC-controlled box, revealing a shiny new N900 inside.
Utku, a Product Manager at web design agency Mint Digital, managed to get a Nokia N900, copy of Modern Warfare 2 on the PS3, and a few other presents out of the box by following the commands at hackerbox.co.uk, which was printed on a card on the box, dropped off at his office this morning.
They plugged it into a MacBook via USB, but couldn't get any joy. After connecting it to a Windows machine, they followed the commands, and judging by the photos, the sentence "connecting people" worked like magic, and the box opened with a cloud of smoke.
Corny, yes. Promotional propaganda, true. But it sure does makes me smile. [Nokia Hackerbox via Utku via SlashGear]
Re-enactment of the box hacking, below:
