Eh?
“McNeill says consumers reported the product had ‘an unusual moldy, musty, or mildew-like odor’ linked to symptoms of nausea, stomach pain, vomiting, and diarrhea.’”
If it smells moldy and unusual, that’s probably a bad sign.
I’m a year behind the times, but this is a good story…
Don’t like speed cameras? Use them to punk your enemies
“Students at Richard Montgomery High School in Maryland have discovered that they can duplicate the license plates of their archenemies by printing a Maryland plate template on a sheet of glossy photo paper and digging up a handy license plate character font, according to a parent speaking to The Sentinel (via /.). This may sound like a janky craft project at first, but these cameras are not sensitive enough to pick up the differences between these paper license plates and the real things. The students then tape the faux plate over their own and purposefully speed in order to be caught by the speed camera, causing the real owner of the license plate to receive a $40 citation in the mail.”
Who monitors the monitors?
From Harper’s magazine:
British entrepreneurs launched Internet Eyes, a program that allows registered users to monitor live feeds from some of the United Kingdom’s 4.2 million surveillance cameras in order to search for a crime in progress, with cash prizes for viewers who spot the most criminals.
The world’s ‘quietest’ room opened its doors for the study of nanotechnology in Bristol. Dr David Carberry prepares an experiment in the new Bristol University building which is the ‘quietest’ in the world Photo: SWNS The ”ultra-low vibration suite”, which cost £11 million, allows scientists to manipulate atoms and molecules without the interference of environmental vibrations interrupting their work. There is virtually no air movement inside the cutting edge laboratory, which is anchored to the rock foundation in the basement of the Nanoscience and Quantum Information Centre in Bristol.”
Not sure about the scare quotes “though”
Study Reveals How Magic Works | LiveScience
“As we are looking at the world, we have this impression that what we see is the real world. What this tells us is the way we see the world is more strongly dominated by how we perceive it to be rather than what it actually is,’ Kuhn added. ‘Even though the ball never left the hand, the reason people saw it leave is because they expected the ball to leave the hand. It’s the beliefs about what should happen that override the actual visual input.’
“Anonymized” data really isn’t—and here’s why not – Ars Technica
“Such work by computer scientists over the last fifteen years has shown a serious flaw in the basic idea behind ‘personal information’: almost all information can be ‘personal’ when combined with enough other relevant bits of data.”
“‘Competition in the OS market should always be welcome, but Google is the special case,’ Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Digital Daily. ‘It has become dominant across many essential Internet services–search, mail, video, online apps, and advertising. Coupled with Google’s growing profiles of American consumers and reluctance to adopt meaningful privacy safeguards, we expect that antitrust authorities in the US and Europe will view Google’s entry into the OS market with enormous skepticism.’”
He has a point…
From John Gruber’s essay on touch keyboards and Apple:
Apple tries to make things that many people love, not things that all people like. The key is that they’re not afraid of the staunch criticism, and often outright derision, that comes with breaking conventions.
…
That the iPhone — or specifically its software touchscreen keyboard — does not appeal to everyone is not a problem. Nothing appeals to everyone. Even if you try to make something that appeals to everyone by adding every single clamored-for feature, you wind up with something like Windows that does not appeal to people with a taste for the elegant and refined.
[Too cool for words][wb]
“WASHINGTON, D.C. (ISNS) — The three best visual illusions in the world were chosen at a gathering last weekend of neuroscientists and psychologists at the Naples Philharmonic Center for the Arts in Florida.”
(via Dynamic Diagrams)