Building a nuclear weapon has never been easier. NATO’s Michael Rühle provides step-by-step instructions for going nuclear, from discretely collecting material to minimizing the fallout when caught. These simple steps have worked for the likes of Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea, among others. The nuclear club is open to your country, too.
Scientists have spent the past decade making great strides in the field of brain-computer interfaces (BCI). By attaching a series of electrodes to a human brain, researchers can feed neural impulses from the brain into a computer to allow the direct control of robotic devices. One major downside, of course, is that the electrodes through which the subject controls these robotic devices have to be placed directly on the brain. This drawback had been in large part considered unavoidable, as electrodes placed outside the skull were thought to gather insufficient information to successfully operate a mechanical device. But in a study published last week in The Journal of Neuroscience, researchers were able to use an array of 34 electrodes attached to test-subjects’ scalps to deduce the subjects’ 3-dimensional hand movements. The importance of this work is clear: It may help patients who have lost a limb to operate a replacement robotic prostheses with their brain.
related { Brain-Computer Interface Live demonstration of a brain-controlled Adams Family pinball machine | video }
I am currently ensconced in my plush executive hotel suite in an international location, ready to attend an international marketing conference.
Quite rightly, I’ve been given the VIP treatment because I’ll be one of the conference’s key speakers. At 3am on Sunday in the Herman Goerring Room, I will address a select audience on ‘Female Stereotypes in Advertising’. (They couldn’t have picked a better person, to be honest. I fucking love female stereotypes! I use them all the time!)
I’ll post more on that when I get back, but for now, I thought I’d shine a light on the real goings-on at events such as these.
What do the various attendees want from the event? What do they bring in terms of insight and skillsets? What do they hope to take away with them?
The answer to all those questions is nothing, fuck-all and diddly-squat. But here’s what they’ll actually be up to.
{ I am the client | Continue reading | via copyranter }
makeup { Zach Bowens }
Let’s define the term “value” as “a fair equivalent in money for something sold.”
Let’s define “devalue” as “to lessen the worth off something sold.”
So does a $1.99 price point for ebooks constitute their value? Or does that price devalue the work?
In a capitalist economy, under the rules of supply and demand, things cost money to produce, and their price is dictated by how many things are produced and how many people want to buy them.
An item usually costs a determined amount to create (which tends to go down as more items are produced), and then wholesalers and retailers sell this item for what the market will bear, trying to make a profit.
A few years ago, when the Nintendo Wii was a hot item and hard to find, people who were able to get Wiis sold them on eBay for more than double the $199 list price. The Wii’s value was higher, because demand was higher.
Now you can buy used Wii’s for less than $100. There is a big enough supply for everyone, so the price comes down.
So how do ebooks fit into this?
For the moment, let’s ignore the hard work the author has put into writing the book.
To bring an ebook to market, a book needs to be edited, proofread, put into a proper layout and format, and given cover art and a product description.
These costs can fluctuate. But they are one-time costs.
Once an ebook is created, it can be reproduced indefinitely for free. There are no printing costs or shipping costs. Distributing ebooks to readers costs about 5 cents per download.
{ Why do we believe, and are atheists really more intelligent? | Artwork: Andrea Mantegna, Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, 1470-75 }
How to rate the sportsmen and women of the day against the stars of yesteryear.
There’s no easy way to make meaningful comparisons when sports change so dramatically over the years. Even in endeavours like baseball where player stats have been meticulously kept for almost a hundred years, comparisons across the decades can be odious. Is it really fair to compare players from the 1920s against those of the last 20 years when so many external factors have changed such as the use of new equipment, better training methods and, of course, performance enhancing drugs?
In 1914, the National League Most Valuable Player was Johnny Evers with a batting average of 0.279, 1 Home Run and 40 Runs Batted In. That was impressive then but these stats would embarrass even a second rate player in today’s game.
But what if there were a way to remove the systematic differences to reveal intrinsic talent? Today, Alexander Petersen at Boston University and a few pals explain just such a method that “detrends” the data leaving an objective measure of a player’s raw ability.
For some of our beliefs, our minds don’t offer much in the way of reasons. We say these beliefs are more “intuitive.” In a hostile debating context this response can seem suspicious; you might expect one side in a debate to refuse to offer reasons just when they had already tested those reasons against criticism, and found them wanting. That is, we might expect a debater to pretend he didn’t have any reasons when he knew his reasons were bad.
{ A 32-year-old Kentucky woman who said she didn’t know that she was pregnant delivered her newborn son on the floor of her laundry room by herself and even cut the umbilical cord. | AP/The Advocate-Messenger | Continue reading }
In the era of globalization, the land of the samurai and the salaryman has acquired a strange new identity. Japan now shows itself to the world as a country of “pink-clad girls, animated fantasies, and winking Kitty logos,” writes Christine R. Yano, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii.
Kawaii, or “Japanese cute,” has become a global phenomenon. The rage for cute stretches from the prepubescent haunts of the world’s shopping malls to the catwalks of haute couture. At New York City’s Fashion Week last year, one show featured the work of 30 cutting-edge designers inspired by Hello Kitty, the iconic mouthless cartoon kitten that engendered Japanese cute. In Times Square, shoppers flocked to a newly opened Sanrio Luxe boutique peddling diamond-encrusted Hello Kitty watches and fine luggage.
Sanrio is the company that launched Hello Kitty and the whole cute phenomenon in the 1970s. Founder Tsuji Shinitarou saw the cartoon figure as “the Japanese cat that would overtake the American mouse,” according to Yano. He is the de facto father of “pink globalization.”
When I was single, I toured around Japan while between jobs, and early in my trip hooked up with a couple of fellow Americans—a former college basketball player and multi-millionaire heir, and his girlfriend, an IBM salesperson. He was about 6’5”; she was 6’1”, ponytailed, and looked like a beach volleyball player. I’m 6’3”.
In just the past generation, the Japanese have pretty much caught up with Westerners in terms of height, but 22 years ago, people of our size were still a novelty, and the three of us were mobbed on a couple of occasions—I have some photographs of the millionaire’s girlfriend and me in a parking lot at Mt. Fuji surrounded by high-school girls clamoring for our autographs merely because of our foreignness and our parents’ foresight in deeding us tall genes. (…)
Lastly, whether they are drunk or sober, Japan’s people are at once welcoming and friendly, and yet incredibly prone to either cause foreigners to act in foolish ways, or to act, themselves, in foolish ways in front of foreigners.
The human form, disrobed and displayed in all its glory, is arguably the most enduring motif in the history of Western art. Museums dedicated to art both ancient and modern are filled with nudes rendered every which way: painted, chiseled, molded, sketched and photographed. They’re just usually not living and breathing. But come March 14, New York’s Museum of Modern Art will host daily performances of five seminal works by Marina Abramović, three of which feature performers in the altogether. In Imponderabilia (1977), two players stand opposite each other, au naturel, in a narrow doorway. Visitors must brush past them to enter the exhibition—an early, if awkward, example of interactive art.
“This is America!” the Yugoslavian-born Abramović trills jovially in her heavily accented English, on a rainy fall day in New York, as she considers the potentially embarrassing encounter in what will be the first live exhibition of nudes in the museum’s history. “Is going to be riots! I have so many meetings with the security of MoMA and how we’re going to deal with things.”
In all fairness, yes, Americans have a more delicate relationship with nakedness than Europeans, but Abramović acknowledges that when she and her former collaborator and lover, Ulay, performed the piece at a museum in Bologna, Italy, the police showed up six hours into it, asked to see their passports (which they obviously didn’t have on them) and promptly shut down the performance. This time around, regulations mandate that MoMA provide a second route into the exhibition—one with a wider opening to allow for wheelchairs—a measure Abramović finds understandable but disappointing. “I hate that alternative because in the original piece there was no alternative—you go here,” she says, seated in her midtown office as she points to a photograph of Ulay and herself, face-to-face in the passageway, while a man turned slightly sideways tries to negotiate the cramped space. Even so, Abramović has come up with one small tweak: Though the original conceit paired a man and a woman, she now plans to mix up the couples taking turns performing Imponderabilia so that some are same-sex.
At 64, Abramović is the doyenne of performance art, a true believer who has literally risked her life more than once in fealty to her work. Decades after her peers segued exclusively into other—typically more lucrative—art forms, she is still constructing new performances, though she does dabble in other mediums. For the MoMA retrospective, the 36 hired players will rotate every two and a half hours to allow for breaks, while Abramović herself will perform a new work nonstop during museum hours for the duration of the exhibition. That’s seven and a half hours a day, five days a week; 10 hours on Friday. For three months. “The idea is that we are there before the museum opens, and we are there when the museum closes,” she says. “The attitude is the same as toward a painting—the performance is always there. It’s never been done that way for three months, ever, in history.”
{ W | Continue reading | More: NY Times | NY Times video }
related { Nude Statues Installed On Rooftops In NYC }
photo { Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir }
A Detroit neighborhood fights for its life, and an ex-cop leads the way
Jackson knows that, in Michigan, the law says that if your life’s in danger, you have a right to use deadly force to defend yourself. That’s why he keeps a baseball bat stashed on his porch. That’s why he sat there late one night, waiting with that shotgun.
He had seen the old Chevy before, and knew the drug-dealing gunman was inside it. The car belonged to a guy in the dealer’s posse. But it didn’t stay long. Between the armed ex-cop and the video camera mounted above the porch, the dealer had few options. The Chevy backed out of the driveway and left the same way it came.
Jackson is the de facto leader of the neighborhood, like an unofficial sheriff. He’s 63, burly and slower-moving in his retirement. Everyone here knows him, and everyone here calls him Jack Rabbit, a nickname he has had for years. He’s president of the Jefferson-Chalmers Homeowners Association, president of the Jefferson-Chalmers Citizens District Council, and he’s on the Jefferson East Business Association’s board of directors. He plows snow from the wintertime streets and sidewalks with his truck. He’s the neighborhood lookout, and, through his homeowners association, he offers a monthly reward for local crime tips. He’s the one who urges everyone in his neighborhood to stay vigilant, the one who confronts criminals on the street and videotapes them.
related { Demolishing Density in Detroit: Can Farming Save the Motor City? }
photo { Thanks Shampoo! }
