ELI5: Why did the dial-up sound have to be played out loud? : explainlikeimfive. How to Buy Food: The Psychology of the Supermarket - Bon Appétit. This is the first part of a two-part series on how to get the most of your supermarket-shopping experience. Part One discusses how supermarkets try to get you to spend more time and money than you originally wanted. Part Two, to come later, will lead you step by step through a supermarket trip, and give you tips on how to buy food the right way. The simple fact of the matter is that going grocery shopping isn’t—and never was—as simple as you imagined, whether you’re on your own for the first time, or you’ve been shopping for a family of eight for 20 years.
Sometimes it seems less like you’re going out to buy milk and bread than you’re buffeted by endless marketing, too many choices, and not enough information. Does the perky green label mean that this box of cereal is good for me? Are there certain expiration dates that are less important than others? Am I a bad mom if I buy frozen spinach for dinner? Even professional food writers and editors ask these questions. Psychological Warfare. The kindest cut: my journey into the nether regions of male birth control | The Verge. Burning my baby-making apparatus into oblivion Vasectomy seemed appealing for a few reasons. From what I read before I made my appointment, vasectomy was a relatively simple outpatient procedure, wouldn’t affect my sex life, and could be reversed if a few years from now we won the lottery and could afford another child.
So I was a little startled when Dr. Nejat declared in no uncertain terms that the procedure would be "permanent. " "I thought vasectomies were reversible," I half-whispered, still prostrate on the examining table. And that, ultimately, was the hardest part of a vasectomy for me. There was no turning back now, I thought. But as I walked out to the parking lot, I was thinking that I had one month until the procedure, plenty of time to come up with a less drastic alternative. Paupers, perverts, and old men - a brief history of vasectomy Throughout the 1800s several surgeons followed Cooper’s work with experiments on the vas deferens of rabbits, pigs, and rats.
This Calculator Shows How Long It Will Take to Save a Million Dollars. Algae Virus May Be Changing Cognitive Ability. While conducting a totally separate experiment, a group of scientists from Johns Hopkins and the University of Nebraska accidentally discovered something unexpected and potentially disturbing. A virus was living in the mouths and throats of a good portion of the people in the study, a virus that the researchers didn't think was capable of infecting humans. Worse still, it seemed to be slowing some of the subjects' mental abilities, especially their ability to process visual information.
The surprising part about this for researchers was that a microscopic organism that we thought could only infect algae — plants — was living in about 40% of the small number of people tested. For the rest of us, the bigger surprise may be that this virus could join the ranks of microorganisms that live inside and on us, changing the way we think. In a way, this is less crazy than it seems. There are far more microorganisms in and on a "person" than there are "human cells. " Here's What Scientists Discovered. Libraries unearths the earliest U.S. website. By Gabrielle Karampelas L.A. Cicero Physicist Paul Kunz installed the first web server outside of Europe at SLAC, with the first SLAC websites added between Dec. 6 and Dec. 12, 1991.
Some of the earliest pages from the World Wide Web have been restored and are once again browsable, providing a glimpse of how the web once operated. Stanford Libraries has made these pages available with Stanford Wayback, a customized version of an open source platform that enables long-term access to archived web assets. The first website featured in Stanford Wayback is the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory site. "Thankfully, a handful of staff at SLAC who worked on the early web fortuitously saved the files, along with their timestamps, associated with the first and several subsequent versions of their website," said Nicholas Taylor, web archiving service manager for Stanford Libraries.
A website is born Preserving at-risk content Web archiving is the latest digital service being provided by the Libraries. Freaked out by artificial intelligence? Don’t watch the trailer to “Ex Machina” By David Holmes On October 30, 2014 One of the good things about living in a scarily disruptive era of unprecedented surveillance and technology is that it makes for great fodder for artists. From “Her” to “Black Mirror,” the past couple years have brought some terrifying and terrifically entertaining science fiction stories that speak volumes about today’s world. After all, with technological advancement moving faster than ever, the future worlds imagined by these films have never been closer to reality.
While my anxieties tend more toward out-of-control corporate surveillance and the emotional wreckage caused by technology addictions, there’s one fear that’s as old as the golems of Jewish lore: A robot takeover. These fears aren’t limited to wearers of tin foil hats, either. Elon Musk, one of the smartest guys on the planet, recently likened artificial intelligence to “summoning the demon.” Watch the full trailer: How different religions would deal with aliens. The Empire of Harmlessness: Hello Kitty at 40. I see debt people: 10 scary economic charts for Halloween - Quartz. Ghosts, zombies, witches… and unemployment rates. If you want a real scare this Halloween, check out these charts hand-picked by Quartz’s writers and editors that show the most ghastly trends in the global economy. But be warned—these blood-curdling bars and bone-chilling lines aren’t for the squeamish… 1.
Southern Europe’s jobless youth More than half of Greek and Spaniard young people are out of work, and have been for some time. But while youth unemployment rates there have plateaued (or even started to fall), Italy’s stagnating economy is pushing more and more young people out of work. 2. Japan’s working-age population peaked in 1995, and it’s been downhill ever since. 3. Europe’s biggest banks mostly passed a recent stress test, but that doesn’t mean that they’re in particularly good health. 4. The stock of outstanding student debt in the US has surged to more than $1.1 trillion. 5. Everyone knows that higher education is a costly undertaking in the US. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Autodesk take aim at the disappointment of 3D printing. By James Robinson On October 30, 2014 Last September, Autodesk opened a large two-story workshop on Pier 9 on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, a luxuriant facility with the indulgent goal of bringing its employees closer to the machines they were making software for.
“People said, ‘A workshop? On the water? In downtown San Francisco? From Autodesk? The 27,000 square foot Pier 9 building is an architectural pearl. As Hanna outlines, over 8,000 people have visited it in the last year and it is now one of Autodesk’s most visited offices. But aside from using the day’s event as a spotlight for the Pier 9 building and the green architectural ethos it embraces, Hanna’s words were notable for the fact that he used much of his time at the podium to call out the colossal disappointment of the 3D printing industry so far. “200,000 printers have been sold worldwide, which is miniscule next to the hype and opportunity of it all,” Hanna says. Big talk. [illustration by Brad Jonas for Pando] Future foods: What will we be eating in 20 years' time? Volatile food prices and a growing population mean we have to rethink what we eat, say food futurologists. So what might we be serving up in 20 years' time? It's not immediately obvious what links Nasa, the price of meat and brass bands, but all three are playing a part in shaping what we will eat in the future and how we will eat it.
Rising food prices, the growing population and environmental concerns are just a few issues that have organisations - including the United Nations and the government - worrying about how we will feed ourselves in the future. In the UK, meat prices are anticipated to have a huge impact on our diets. Some in the food industry estimate they could double in the next five to seven years, making meat a luxury item. "In the West many of us have grown up with cheap, abundant meat," says food futurologist Morgaine Gaye. "Rising prices mean we are now starting to see the return of meat as a luxury.
So what will fill such gaps and our stomachs - and how will we eat it? Why stay-at-home parents are better for older children. It may be the most hotly disputed and emotionally loaded question that American parents face: Are children better off if a parent stays at home? The evidence is already quite strong that staying at home during a child’s first year of life can have long-term benefits. That’s why most industrial nations (though not the United States) guarantee at least some paid parental leave for working mothers and fathers. What’s been less clear is whether stay-at-home parenting also benefits older children who may already be in elementary or even middle school. On the one hand, the additional income from a second salary is crucial for many families.
On the other hand, it is hard to match the attention and guidance that an involved parent can provide. It’s an issue for fathers and mothers alike, but women account for the overwhelming majority of parents who give up outside jobs to care for their children. Norway’s program By way of background, Norway has long had excellent publicly subsidized daycare. Startup Semprius Fights to Bring Breakthrough Solar Tech to Market. The power unit is a rectangular slab about the size of a movie theater screen. It’s mounted on a thick steel post, and equipped with a tracking mechanism that continuously points it at the sun.
The slab is made of over 100,000 small lenses and an equal number of even smaller solar cells, each the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen. This contraption is part of one of the most efficient solar power devices ever made. Semprius, a startup based in Durham, North Carolina, claims that the next generation of this power unit will make solar power the cheapest option for utilities installing new power plants. With fields of over 1,000 of these devices, utilities would produce electricity at less than 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. That is even cheaper than today’s least expensive option: a new natural gas plant. The technology originated in the lab of John Rogers, a professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois. Magic Stamp Valley of Darkness.
The Green Monster - Garrett M. Graff - POLITICO Magazine. Gil Kerlikowske was hoping to make it through at least his first week on the job without being awakened in the middle of the night. President Barack Obama’s new head of Customs and Border Protection, Kerlikowske could have used a week of quiet as he began to figure out the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, with its 46,000 gun-carrying Customs officers and Border Patrol agents and massive $12.4 billion annual budget. He didn’t get it. On his sixth night after taking office in March, a Border Patrol agent’s single gunshot 1,500 miles away from Washington interrupted Kerlikowske’s sleep. The gunshot itself wasn’t all that surprising; Border Patrol agents regularly open fire on suspected smugglers, border crossers and people harassing them from across the Mexican line.
That, too, was a common occurrence. Except that they surrendered to Esteban Manzanares. Then he stopped his truck in a wooded area. Now it was definitely time to tell the new commissioner. Silicon Valley's "Body Shop" Secret: Highly Educated Foreign Workers Treated Like Indentured Servants. NBC Bay Area investigative reporter Stephen Stock reveals a system that leaves some high-tech workers trapped like indentured servants. (Published Tuesday, Oct 28, 2014) A year-long investigation by NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit and The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) raises questions about a well-known visa program setup to recruit foreign workers to the US: Is it indentured servitude in the high tech age?
Or is it a necessary business model to compete in a quickly changing high tech economy? NBC Bay Area and CIR’s team discovered an organized system that supplies cheap labor made up of highly-educated and highly-skilled foreign workers who come to the US via H-1B visas. Consulting firms recruit and then subcontract out skilled foreigners to major tech firms throughout the country and many in Silicon Valley. Those who work for these third party firms that skirt the law often call them “body shops” and sometimes they get caught. H-1B Visas Broken Promises Rules Ignored or Broken. The New Heroin Epidemic. In a beige conference room in Morgantown, West Virginia, Katie Chiasson-Downs, a slight, blond woman with a dimpled smile, read out the good news first.
“Sarah is getting married next month, so I expect her to be a little stressed,” she said to the room. “Rebecca is moving along with her pregnancy. This is Betty’s last group with us.” “Felicia is having difficulties with doctors following up with her care for what she thinks is MRSA,” Chiasson-Downs continued. “Charlie wasn’t here last time, he cancelled. Hank ...” “Hank needs a sponsor, bad,” said Carl Sullivan, a middle-aged doctor with auburn hair and a deep drawl. “This was Tom’s first time back in the group, he seemed happy to be there,” Chiasson-Downs went on, reading from her list.
“He had to work all the way back up,” Sullivan added. Chiasson-Downs’ patients are in the “advanced” group—so called because they’re well into their recoveries. For patients in the less advanced groups, the therapists’ updates are gloomier. Gold origami exerts strange power over light - tech - 30 October 2014. SHEETS of gold one nano-particle thick have been folded into tiny origami. Dubbed plasmene, the material has some of the weirdest optical properties around. It could someday enable things like invisibility cloaks and super-efficient solar cells.
Plasmonic materials, such as gold and silver, capture light and transmit it along their surfaces as waves of electrons called plasmons. They can squeeze light into spaces smaller than the laws of physics normally allow. That makes them tempting materials for use in antennas to pick up light signals, and possibly someday Harry Potter-style invisibility cloaks.
Wenlong Cheng at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues made the thin material by coating nanocubes of gold and silver in polystyrene, suspending them in a chloroform solution then spreading it over a fine mesh. "That amazed me," says Michael Cortie at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. More From New Scientist Quantum computer buyers' guide: Apps () Robert Frost's answer to How is the age of the universe determined to be approximately 13.8 billion years? Magic Mushrooms Create a Hyperconnected Brain. Magic mushrooms may give users trippy experiences by creating a hyperconnected brain. The active ingredient in the psychedelic drug, psilocybin, seems to completely disrupt the normal communication networks in the brain, by connecting "brain regions that don't normally talk together," said study co-author Paul Expert, a physicist at King's College London.
The research, which was published today (Oct. 28) in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, is part of a larger effort to understand how psychedelic drugs work, in the hopes that they could one day be used by psychiatrists — in carefully controlled settings — to treat conditions such as depression, Expert said. [Trippy Tales: The History of 8 Hallucinogens] Magic mushrooms Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, is best known for triggering vivid hallucinations.
But the drug also seems to have more long-lasting effects. Making connections Drug's effect. The Age Kids Have to Be Before You Can Legally Leave Them Home Alone. Answer to Where is paradise? We asked for flying cars and all we got was the entire planet communicating instantly via pocket supercomputers. Google's Secretive DeepMind Start-up Unveils A "Neural Turing Machine" 50 Great Teachers: Socrates, The Ancient World's Teaching Superstar : NPR Ed.
The Inner Workings of the Executive Brain. [Miscellany] | Found Money, by Alice Gregory. Startups Anonymous: An important message to founders about humility. Watch The Avengers Try to Lift Thor’s Hammer | TIME. Straight bar passing through curved hole. OECypx2. Apple Pay’s first week reminds us that Apple’s secret sauce is in driving adoption.
You can run, but you can’t hide: Google expands its real-world surveillance system with Google Fit. Poor Countries Tap Renewables at Twice the Pace of Rich. The Inner Workings of the Executive Brain - WSJ. Compensation and punishment: 'Justice' depends on whether or not we're a victim -- ScienceDaily. [Miscellany] | Found Money, by Alice Gregory. Reddit’s new crowdfunding platform actually gets a lot of things right. This is one of the better drawings I've seen in a while. Robert Frost's answer to Is it possible for a star to orbit a planet? Has it ever been observed? Jon Harley's answer to Comparing Countries: What are some things you can do in France but not in the USA?
Switzerland's shame: The children used as cheap farm labour. This Is How Walmart Can Win Its War With Apple | Money.com. Sleep: Weird things people do in their sleep. 25 Pictures That Will Teach You Something For Once In Your Life. Vivienne Chen's answer to What explains the popularity of the name "Vivian" among women of Asian descent? This is why people leave your company. A sneak peek at the radically new Angular 2.0 - JAXenter. Why would someone steal the world’s rarest water lily? | Sam Knight | News. What is parliament and how does it work? Elon Musk Compares Rogue Artificial Intelligence to Demons. Yes, Really. Humanity. Astronaut Chris Hadfield took 45,000 photos from space—here are some of the best. How horseshoe crabs may have saved your life. Apple CEO fires back as retailers block Pay.
Alex Wu's answer to Why does Luis Suarez bite players? Does he have some kind of psychological disorder? Billionaires to Retain Control of Government - The New Yorker. Inside Rent The Runway's Secret Dry-Cleaning Empire. This Diagram Shows How Restaurant Menus Play Tricks on Your Mind. The Difference in Monthly Housing Costs Between Renters and Homeowners.
The Crisis in U.S.-Israel Relations Is Officially Here. A Foodie Repents. Photos of the Day: Oct. 27 - WSJ - WSJ. Verizon's 'Perma-Cookie' Is a Privacy-Killing Machine. Relationship Closeness Inventory Online Test. Behold The Entrenched — And Reviled — Annual Review. New study strengthens link between Arctic sea-ice loss and extreme winters. 0x5f3759df | Hummus and Magnets. How Much Caffeine Is Too Much? - WSJ - WSJ. Stan Hayward's answer to I don't like anything. What should I do? 'Sweeping change' narrows gender gap. Most Powerful Militaries In The Middle East. The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. Windowless Planes Could Take To The Skies In 10 Years. The future is disappearing: How humanity is falling short of its grand technological promise. Sources: Andy White, Vegas Tech Fund partner, latest to go in Tony Hsieh’s housecleaning.
ELI5: Why do all the planets spin the same direction around the sun? : explainlikeimfive. Oil price will fall to $70 US a barrel in 2015, Goldman Sachs says. Bob Dylan’s “The Basement Tapes Complete” Virali Modi's answer to Why should I do something from which I am not going to gain anything? How Motif helped two 11-year-olds beat Ivy League MBAs in an investing contest. Online.wsj. Answer to Do foreigners have a bad reputation in Japan? Tom Byron's answer to What is the question that you have pondered longest in your life? Feds identify suspected 'second leaker' for Snowden reporters. Indigenous Communities Take Chevron to Global Court for 'Crimes Against Humanity' Answer to What are the disadvantages of being smart? Brain scans show cause of seasonal affective disorder. New York State of Mind. An undocumented immigrant’s dream deferred | The Washington Post. Free apps used to spy on millions of phones - Nerdoholic.
These Guys Are Buying Every Beer in America to Make a Pandora for Alcohol’ -- Grub Street. Africa in pictures: 17-23 October 2014. SFTtech/openage. Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns. The biggest CIA-drug money scandal you never read. 15307929495_c605555414_h.jpg (JPEG Image, 1600 × 686 pixels) - Scaled (64%) Amazon has $83 million worth of Fire Phones it can’t sell. The Economic Impact of School Suspensions. ELI5: Why do I read stories every few months about researchers developing amazing new battery technology but batteries still suck after so many years? : explainlikeimfive.