randomWalks

The Hope Creek reactor is the same model as the plant that melted down in Japan following the catastrophic tsunami and earthquake in the spring.

They’ve added all of the ports you’ll normally use to their new generation of displays, and they use a Thunderbolt cable to handle the communication for all of those ports using a single cable. To connect, you just plug in the Thunderbolt cable and the power cable from the monitor. You can even daisy chain multiple monitors through a single Thunderbolt connection.

Interests: Getting my innocent brother freed from prison after 28 years and counting

There are good foods and bad foods, and the advice should be to eat the good foods more and the bad foods less.

I was recently at a very large consumer products company (stay tuned) where there was a wall of different phones and tablets from which managers could choose, then sit in a mockup hotel room to test how they’d work with it remotely. “Three to five years from now, everyone will be bringing their own device into work anyway,” the CIO told me. “I have to turn that issue into an opportunity.”

[gallery]

Check out the Monopoly™ deed style on this early-20th-century ‘trade card’ advertising an island on the Jersey shore just south of Atlantic City.

(via Strathmere - a brief history & vintage photos) 

Like all past versions of Mac OS X, Lion has no serial number, no product activation, and no DRM of any kind.

Apple couldn’t get much bigger without selling oil, while the media industry has been reduced to dime-size buttons that show up on iPhone screens. Google regularly announces initiatives to “save” the newspaper and book industries — like a modern-day hunter who proclaims himself a conservationist. And Facebook, having already swallowed up enormous chunks of discretionary media consumption time, has its old-school media counterparts chasing after “Likes” as if they were cocaine being dispensed in a lab rat’s cage.

[gallery]

(via huxley vs. orwell - mlkshk) The first night I really got drunk I met a friend of a friend who talked my ear off about a book by Herman Hesse I’d never heard of which postulated a future dystopia in which the masses were mollified by an abundance of information: publishing was seen as a virtue but functioned as a vice, drowning the populace in irrelevancies. It took me a decade but I think the book was The Glass Bead Game. Have you read it?

[gallery]

(via Shabazz Palaces @#p4kfest - mlkshk)

Peep exploits human instinct: our ability to notice a deviation from the norm with little effort, to determine what sounds right, and to discern singular important sounds from a collection of many sounds. We do these tasks with little or no conscious effort. Since computer interfaces mainly require the visual senses (and some motor skills), the audio senses are left available to perform this unconscious processing.

I made the same trip in 1958 in a ‘53 Hudson. The worst seating position of any car that had ever been invented. And if the film is authentic, the driver will be squirming with a sore back all the way. Good luck, everybody!

So then World War II comes and then everyone’s sad for a while—a simplification of history—and then everyone wants to be cheered up, so along came the Beatles, just in time.

Musicians come and go and they’re stewards of the music for a brief period of time. But once the music plays—it’s really between Beethoven and the listener at that point. The musicians are there to get their goddamn hands off of it. All that training! Thousands of hours! Sight-reading every day! All so they can get the hell out of the way because nobody gives a crap about them at all.

I got to play with these orchestras recently, at Carnegie Hall. One of the best musical experiences of my life. You go in and there are all the walls covered in photos of great conductors. A picture of Mark Twain standing on the stage. This is what you walk by before you go onstage, in case anyone ever wants to try and have an ego in that room.

When 1 out of 5 students in the class being involved in a cheating case, the lectures and class discussions became awkward. For the rest of the semester there was a palpable anxiousness in class. Instead of having friendly discussions, the discussions became contentious. Not a pleasant environment.

This, of course, had a direct effect to my teaching evaluations. Instead of the usual evaluations that were in the region of 6.0 to 6.5 out of seven, this time my ratings went down by almost a point: 5.3 out of 7.0. Instead of being a teacher in the upper percentiles, I was now below average.

The Dean’s office and my chair “expressed their appreciation” for me chasing such cases (in December), but six months later, when I received my annual evaluation, my yearly salary increase was the lowest ever, as my “teaching evaluations took a hit this year”.

As if vocabulary itself materializes, precipitating out as alternative spatial futures for the city.

I would like to see our NGO post the state’s rules in the community kitchen and then let people make their own decision; keep the market together and let the state come down and pluck out who’s following the rules and who is not. Are folks who create cottage industry going to be forced to sell the goods from their homes or from hidden baskets under tables at the market?

Now many people know that octopii can change color but they think it’s for camoflage, for blending in with the environment, this is not at all the case. The reason octopii change colors in a very large repatoire of stripes, dots, blushes, travelling shades and tonal shifts is because this is for them a channel of linguistic communication.

Imagine another room within that room whose doorway is also sealed behind drywall—and then other rooms within that room, and further corridors and stairs and entrances. Tap, tap, tap—you navigate by sound, knocking deeper and deeper into an architectural world you only reveal by means of careful deconstruction.

Neurochemicals are highly conserved in evolution - bacteria, plants, insects, and fish all produce forms of the neurochemicals called the catecholemines. Thus it makes sense that bacteria in our gut can communicate directly with using, to some extent, the same “language” as our mammalian brains. Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium species are known to produce GABA. Escherichia, Bacillus, and Saccharomyces produce norepinephrine. Candida, Streptococcus, Escherichia, and Enterococcus produce serotonin. Bacillus and Serratia produce dopamine, and Lactobacillus species produce acetylcholine. That’s pretty much the entire hit parade of major neurotransmitters

tumblr_loeu2kX88e1qbyn0q

Murdoch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!
     Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old
     men weeping in the parks!

Murdoch! Murdoch! Nightmare of Murdoch! Murdoch the loveless!
     Mental Murdoch! Murdoch the heavy judger of men!

Murdoch the incomprehensible prison! Murdoch the crossbone soulless
     jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Murdoch whose buildings are
     judgment! Murdoch the vast stone of war! Murdoch the stunned
     governments!

Murdoch whose mind is pure machinery! Murdoch whose blood is running money!
     Murdoch whose fingers are ten armies! Murdoch whose breast is a
     cannibal dynamo! Murdoch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
     Murdoch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Murdoch whose skyscraper
     stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Murdoch whose
     factories dream and croak in the fog! Murdoch whose smoke-stacks and
     antennae crown the cities!

Murdoch whose love is endless oil and stone! Murdoch whose soul is
     electricity and banks! Murdoch whose poverty is the specter of genius!
     Murdoch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Murdoch whose name
     is the Mind!

Where it says ‘Moloch’, say ‘Murdoch’. via https://twitter.com/stevesilberman

Also, the idea that the “hidden” sculpture could, in fact, remain hidden unless the wind were to blog a certain way, revealing itself to the listener.