During the 1980s, author and map enthusiast Hans Harlén calculated the center of Stockholm. For decades, nobody paid attention to his project.
Fast forward to 2012. Harlén’s project came to the attention of a city guide named Per Haukaas, and a sign was erected on the site that Harlén identified as the center of Sweden’s capital city.
Now the center is marked for all to see, and unlike most city centers, it’s a charming and calm park located around a roundabout.
Are you a healthy person who’s afraid of overeating on certain occasions, such as Thanksgiving and birthdays? If yes, then let me tell you this: you don’t need to be afraid of overeating occasionally. A recent study, published last April by the Cambridge University Press, suggests that binge eating occasionally does not have immediate negative consequences, as the body can cope “remarkably well when faced with a massive and sudden calorie excess.”
The over-fed body fails in one category: energy level. The overeaters were lethargic for a prolonged period of over four hours. So the price you pay for a pizza binge is a so-called food coma.
The take-home: “This study shows that if an otherwise healthy person overindulges occasionally, for example eating a large buffet meal or Christmas lunch, then there are no immediate negative consequences in terms of losing metabolic control,”...
More details about this study over at Fast Company.
Because data is now the world’s most valuable resource, it is not surprising that companies want their hands on every kind of data that they can get. It seems that car companies are no longer just interested in making profit through cars; they are now also interested in making money through gathering information.
To the public and to legislators, automakers market the systems as safety features. If a car can detect that a driver is angry or looking at their phone immediately before a crash, these companies reason, the onboard AI may be able to offer a warning the next time it senses similar behavior. Or, if it can determine how a child is positioned in the back seat, the car might deploy airbags more effectively in the event of a collision.
But safety is only one attraction of in-cabin monitoring. The systems also hold huge potential for harvesting the kind of behavioral data that Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists have exploited to target ads and influence purchasing habits.
They say that life begins at 40, and as I grow older I have come to realize how truthful this statement is. People who are now in their forties have enough wisdom and the necessary life skills to survive and enjoy life. And now that they truly have experienced life, they give these useful life lessons to the next generation.
A few months ago, a Reddit user named peeledraspberry asked all the folks over 40, who feel happy about their lives, to share some of their best advice to all the lost twentysomethings out there.
It's one thing to modify DNA to reflect different genetic traits. It's quite another to use DNA as a data storage device. But that's what scientists at the University of Texas have manged to do. They encoded an Esperanto translation of L. Frank Baum's novel The Wizard of Oz onto DNA. IEEE Spectrum explains why this task is so challenging:
To make a workable DNA data storage standard, you need instead to worry about substitutions, insertions and deletions. The first is similar to a bit flip in which, say, an A nucleotide is substituted in the place where a T nucleotide used to be. (A, C, T and G and not 0 and 1 are the base language of DNA information.) The latter two classes of error represent cases, as the names suggest, where DNA base pairs are inserted or deleted from a strand.
Crucially, however, with DNA there is no reliable, inherent way of knowing that the strand you’re reading off contains any substitution, insertion or deletion errors. There’s no such thing as a countable and quantifiable DNA “memory register.” Every base pair is just another nucleotide in a long sequence. And together they all form just another strand of DNA.
After separating the text into nucleotide sequences, the scientists then had to encode it:
Encoding The Wizard of Oz into DNA, then, involved passing the data through an “outer” coding layer and an “inner” coding layer. (Think of these steps as two separate algorithms in a complex cryptographic standard.)
The outer layer diagonalized the source data so that any given strand of DNA would contain shards of many portions of the message. The inner layer, HEDGES, then translates each bit into an A, C, T or G according to an algorithm that depends both on the zero or one value of that bit plus additional information about its place in the data stream as well as the data bits immediately preceding it.
They then subjected the DNA to stresses. It proved to be remarkably durable, thus evidencing the utility of DNA for data storage.
Seeing these photos can make you feel bad for the person involved, or may just make you feel slightly better on a crappy day. The people in these photos had a stroke of bad luck. One was going to clean up a massive olive oil spill in the supermarket. Do you know how greasy those are? Check out the other photos on Buzzfeed.
In the fall of 1940, the German army rounded up Jewish people in Warsaw, Poland, and restricted them to a scant 1.3 square mile area. This become known as the Warsaw Ghetto, where 400,000 people were forced to live in a density more than ten times that of New York City. How does one fight disease in such conditions?
German officials knew enough about the spread of typhus to know that by overcrowding, starving and depriving the Jewish residents of basic necessities, the ghetto would become a breeding ground for infection. Additional food supplies were blocked until May 1941, at which point rations provided by authorities amounted to no more than 200 calories per day, per person. The starvation made fighting any disease that did emerge near impossible, and louse vectors spread easily due to a lack of adequate sanitation and an abundance of hosts.
More than 100,000 Jews were infected by typhus and at least 25,000 died directly from it. But, just before the winter of 1941, as an epidemic in the ghetto was breaking out, something remarkable happened: cases dropped exponentially when they should have continued to rise.
A new study of data from health records, diaries, and other archives from the ghetto show how Jewish doctors led a public health campaign that used what little they had to combat typhus: information. That included not only managing the inhabitants of the ghetto, but also running a clandestine medical school and lying to the Germans. Read about the fight against typhus in the Warsaw Ghetto at Smithsonian.
Why withdraw hundreds of dollars to pay for a gadget when you can buy it with a swipe of your credit card? With this day and age, more people are inclined to use cashless transactions for their big purchases. However, it seems that some people still use cold cash for their most expensive purchases. In a survey done by The Hustle, they asked their readers to share their most expensive all-cash purchases:
Nearly 500 people responded, reporting everything from a $250 pair of red leather platform goth boots to a $1,400,000 cash deal on a new house.
Overall, the median all-time high our readers spent on any one thing in cash was $5,800. Car and motorcycle purchases handily topped the list, followed by engagement rings, home repairs, and down payments. Many readers say they secured a better deal by paying in cash — oftentimes under the table.
But there was no shortage of off-the-wall, all-cash transitions, many of which had highly entertaining backstories.
Check out their full breakdown of stories per category here.
When this kid tried to strike a golf ball for the first time, he just made it move a few centimeters away from its original position. But on his second strike, however, something amazing happened — an event that could be considered as just dumb luck or pure talent.
Ghost of Tsushima is a video game released on the PS4 on July 17. The game is set in late 13th-century Japan and revolves around a man named Jin Sakai, a samurai who lives on Tsushima Island. The game is highly praised for its smooth combat. But how realistic is the game when it comes to its combat system? How strong is the playable character’s samurai stances? Japanese sword expert Daniel Ebihara takes a peek at the combat system of one of the most anticipated games this year.
Ramesses II of Egypt left many architectural wonders behind, including two temples built into rock cliffs near the village of Abu Simbel. The problem was that these 3,300-year-old Egyptian treasures lay in what would become Lake Nasser when the Aswan High Dam was built. Egyptian authorities approached UNESCO for a plan to save the temples by moving them to a new location. Moving the massive solid-rock temples would not be simple.
Work began in November 1963. First, a cofferdam was erected around Abu Simbel in order to gain additional time in which to work on the temples while water was collecting in the Aswan dam’s reservoir. The greatest care was needed while cutting up the stones. Power saws could not be used because they made the cuts too wide—anything wider than 8 millimeters would have been visible when the blocks were put back together. Instead, hand saws and steel wires were used to slice up the rocks into blocks each 20 to 30 tons in weight. In the end, the larger temple yielded 807 blocks and the smaller one 235. Once cut, each block was coated to protect it against splitting and fracturing during transport.
The new site was located about 200 meters further inland and 65 meters higher up. Before reassembly could begin, an artificial hill was created using some 330,000 cubic meters of rock to resemble the natural stony hill against which the temples stood at the original site. Then the blocks were put back together with extreme precision, secured to one another with reinforcement bars and the joints filled with an artificial material. Care was taken to maintain the temple’s original alignment to the cardinal directions, so that the rays of the sun would continue to penetrate the sanctuary and illuminate the sculptures on the back wall during certain hours of the spring and autumn.
Get up close and detailed with a kernel of popcorn as it heats up. When the moisture inside turns to steam, the pressure it exerts causes the tough shell to violently burst open, so that the starch inside can freely expand. In this video, the process is seen slower and slower until you have a sequence filmed at 100,000 frames per second, which gives us a long view. We can see how the underside of the kernel is always where the rupture comes, because that's where the heat is. There's enough force to hurtle the kernel into the air as it does its thing. Oh yeah, the popcorn video is only two minutes long. -via Digg
We've often said that the real winners of the California Gold Rush were not the gold prospectors, but those who sold goods and services to the prospectors and miners. That was certainly the case for 14-year-old James Folger, who arrived in California in 1850 with his older brothers Henry and Edward. James was ready to jump at an opportunity, which in his case, took the form of coffee.
By the time they reached the West Coast, they were nearly broke. James agreed to earn money in the city while his older brothers traveled north to pan for gold. James had worked as a carpenter since he was 11, so it was a natural move for him to take a job with William H. Bovee, a 27- year-old transplanted New Yorker who wanted to create a spice and coffee mill. They decided to build it in the heart of San Francisco, just six blocks from the waterfront. James constructed the first wind-powered mill using sails from whaling ships abandoned in the harbor by sailors eager to get to the goldfields. Bovee’s company became the Pioneer Steam Coffee and Spice Mills.
Bovee had run a coffee-roasting business in New York; even there, pre-roasted coffee had been a luxury. Since the mining country offered a huge potential market for men desperate to get easy-to-fix coffee, he figured he and young James were the men to supply it. James traveled to the goldfields in 1851, carrying samples of Pioneer Coffee, sealed in tins. He managed to make one major strike, which provided him with enough capital to set up a country store at a camp called Yankee Jim’s.
Four years later, 18-year-old James sold the store for a profit, returned to San Francisco and resumed his role as a partner in Pioneer Mills. In 1859 Bovee sold his interest in the coffee company to James, who bought out the other partners and renamed the firm the James A. Folger Company.
Read the rest of that story, and also how John Arbuckle Jr. made a name for himself providing coffee to cowboys in Texas and the Southwest during the rise of the cattle industry, at HistoryNet.-Thanks, WTM!
The excitement for Tesla’s Cybertruck has once again reignited as Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed that the color of the truck’s surface could be changed using heated colors.
This alternative uses different temperatures to affect the metal’s chemical coloring, creating a spectrum of color possibilities from yellow to red and blue.
It is still unclear from Musk's tweets whether the color modifications would be an aftermarket job or whether tesla could offer it themselves. We hope to hear more as the Cybertruck edges closer to production – currently slated to hit the market in late 2021.
Nueva Ecija, Philippines — Richmond Perez, along with his girlfriend, Sandra, had been waiting to spot the comet in the night sky for five days. Eventually, the sky cleared out, and they were able to see the comet. And…
As Comet NEOWISE shot across the night sky, Richmond Perez went down on one knee and asked to marry his girlfriend Sandra, and she said yes — for the second time.
When they were taking photos of the comet, Sandra was surprised when her fiance proposed anew during the once in a lifetime opportunity.
"Finally Lord allows us to see this once in a lifetime event. Thank you Lord for these two wonderful creation in front of my eyes," Richmond said.
