Karm City

ARRANGED FOR MILKING

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:56:00 -0400

The cow is a mamal. It has six sides, left, right, and upper and below. At the back it has a tail on which hangs a brush. With this it sends the flies away so that they will not fall in the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns, and so that the mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with. The mouth is to moo with. Under the cow hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking.

When people milk, the milk comes, and there is never an end to the supply. How the cow does it I have not yet realised, but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell; one can smell it far away. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.

The cow does not eat much, but what it eats it eats twice, so that it gets enough. When it is hungry it moos, and when it says nothing it is because all its inside is full up of grass.

-Essay by a 10-year-old boy at Kittybrewster School, Aberdeen.

rickyv: The day after US Air Flight 1549 landed safely in the Hudson, so many people played the...

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 18:33:54 -0400

rickyv:

The day after US Air Flight 1549 landed safely in the Hudson, so many people played the number 1549 in the lottery that some states shut their lotteries down out of fear that if the number hit, they would lose millions.

The New York Pick 4 number that day turned out to be 1548.

Come on, Adobe

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:35:56 -0400

It’s pretty sad that booting Windows XP in a VM is quicker than launching Photoshop CS5. Does it really take all of my MacBook Pro’s brain to manipulate graphics?!

By the people: Isn't this what you get paid for?

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 22:24:23 -0400

By the people: Isn't this what you get paid for?:

So the NAACP has released the full video of former Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod’s remarks that caused such a stir this week. Apparently, the video of her remarks that was posted over the weekend by Andrew Breitbart was heavily edited, so that her comments were taken out of…

Really disappointed in the way the media and the administration(!) dropped the ball on this one.

New worst way to promote your album discovered

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 11:53:00 -0400

New worst way to promote your album discovered:

crumbler:

Just do what the Arcade Fire are doing and release 30-second snippets of every song. It’s a great way to make every song on your new record sound some combination of boring and terrible.

Somewhere the 2004 Arcade Fire is reading this page and singing “Wake Up.”

This is how every single album in the iTunes Store is promoted — you can only hear 30 seconds of any song before purchase. It seems to be working just fine. If a band’s originality can’t be conveyed in any of its snippets, chances are the band just sucks.

Define: placebo effect

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:36:48 -0400

Engadget: “…in our testing, we had far, far fewer dropped calls than we experienced on our 3GS. Let’s just say that again: yes, the iPhone 4 does seem to alleviate the dropped call issue.”

Apple Insider: “the overwhelming majority of reviews are reporting that iPhone 4 has significantly better reception and fewer dropped calls than previous iPhones.”

Venture Beat: “I honestly do see less dropped calls with the iPhone 4.”

Boing Boing: “Dropped or garbly calls did still occur sometimes with this new iPhone. But a little less often”

Apple: “iPhone 4 drops less than one additional call per 100 than the 3GS.”

People keep talking about the end of traditional journalism, but apparently a worthy replacement has yet to be found.

"I was really hoping my shirt would straighten itself once I put it on… but nope, still wrinkly"

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 21:35:00 -0400

““I was really hoping my shirt would straighten itself once I put it on… but nope, still wrinkly””

- Mary

I've been wondering that myself

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:16:36 -0400

Mary: why do i have chess.app

Yes, that is toothpaste in a can. I knew I wouldn’t be...

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 22:33:00 -0400

Yes, that is toothpaste in a can. I knew I wouldn’t be eating Easy Cheese anytime soon, so I had to pick this thing up. What is this world coming to?

It tastes like shaving cream smells.

One downside of multitasking on the iPhone

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 22:55:48 -0400

You have to force-quit apps that continue to run when they shouldn’t.

I used a background-enabled GPS app during my drive home from NYC to Baltimore this weekend. After I got home, and the app had announced that I had “arrived at my destination,” it continued to try to recalculate the route as I walked around my house. My only option was to double-click the home button and force-quit the app.

That’s fine for me, but would grandma be able to figure that little trick out? Probably not.

More likely, the iPhone would utter “recalculating” in her pocketbook until the battery died and she would go back to using a calling card.

With Tesla’s recent announcement of their refreshed...

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 11:29:00 -0400

With Tesla’s recent announcement of their refreshed “Roadster 2.5,” I dove into my archives to find the post I made about the sloppy seam work the early models suffered from.

So how does the new Roadster compare? Using the photo above as evidence, I’d say much better. The rear seams are a bit questionable, but overall, the panels look much tighter and cleaner.

Looking good, Tesla!

Google's Mismanagement of the Android Market

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:25:05 -0400

Google's Mismanagement of the Android Market:

An excellent piece that outlines precisely what happens when you let an App Store market operate freely with no curation whatsoever.

Spoiler alert: spam, spam, copyright infringement, more spam and lots of ringtones.

iHaters gonna iHate

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:07:00 -0400

“This week the engineers at Google remotely activated the so-called Android “kill switch,” a technology which allows the company to remotely remove applications installed on users’ phones.”

What’s this? An “open” app store that can remotely wipe apps from your phone? Yet more evidence that an open marketplace isn’t much different than Apple’s App Store, besides lacking a middleman to vet the quality of submitted applications.

I know it’s the cool thing to hate on Apple these days, but the fact is since the iPhone launched, not much has changed — except that people can actually develop apps for it now! Remember 2007? If you wanted to develop a Windows Mobile app, it was very difficult, if not impossible. Apple made it easy to develop mobile applications for its devices and eventually changed the entire mobile landscape.

But will these haters berate Amazon for being closed by only allowing its Kindle users to buy books from Amazon? Of course they won’t; the Kindle is an amazing device and Amazon has a massive collection of books for it.

The launch of the iPhone 4 shouldn’t suddenly be the reason why people hate Apple. A better screen and another camera hasn’t changed the fact that the App Store has been a walled garden (walled gardens are pretty), and will continue to be.

Soccer

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:42:20 -0400

Eric: i don't know the ref held up a yellow card while looking at one of our players
Eric: maybe he won $1000

jstn: NOAA map showing 3,858 oil platforms along the gulf...

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 15:13:33 -0400

jstn:

NOAA map showing 3,858 oil platforms along the gulf coast as of October, 2006. Katrina and other hurricanes sank or otherwise disabled over 100 of them the year before.

I was surprised to see how many there were, but I guess I shouldn’t have been. Prior to this calamity my two main sources of knowledge regarding oil production were There Will Be Blood and certain scenes from Armageddon. I’ve been trying to acquaint myself with some actual data.

We rank third in oil production in the world and that a third of our production happens off shore. We account for about a quarter of world consumption and a tenth of production (behind Saudi Arabia and Russia). Almost half our supply is used to make gasoline. BP is the fourth biggest company in the world but the third biggest oil company after Shell and Exxon.

I was horrified to read about another spill that happened earlier this month in Nigeria that seems to be amongst the worst ever and has yet to receive much media attention at all. That’s apparently par for the course there.

The Exxon Valdez is 31st in the world ranking of all time oil spills, and since it happened it’s become the “Library of Congress” to which all other spills are inevitably compared. This is quite useful because frankly there’s too many units available for talking about oil and it seems like every news source uses a different one. Wikipedia has tonnage but the American media generally prefers gallons, and the oil industry itself uses barrels. It’s difficult to compare and contrast the horror without converting to a common base. One “Exxon Valdez” is reasonable shorthand for “enough oil to fuck shit up”.

The exact quantities are always fuzzy, of course. The NY Times reports a range of anywhere from 2.25 Exxon Valdezes all the way up to 9 for the Gulf so far, and that’s under the glare of the American public. The one in Nigeria was supposedly 2.5, but who knows. The US produces 19.5 EVs every day.

Not that it’s any comfort, but we still haven’t reached the proportions of the Gulf War spill, which was an astounding 43 EVs. If the one in our own gulf keeps going through August at the most pessimistic rate we could easily see another 20, totaling three times as much as now.

CNN has a good map and USA Today has a good article illustrating the current offshore leasing situation by state. It’s easy to imagine oil executives seeing the planet’s surface as a real life Starcraft map. If we’re lucky, someone will tell them about the hundred billion dollars for every human being on Earth lying in the minerals of the asteroid belt.

Is it asking too much for underwater aliens à la The Abyss to reveal themselves to humanity and show us the error of our ways?

Doping

Sun, 23 May 2010 15:42:04 -0400

I’d like to preface this data by saying I’m a big Lance Armstrong fan. He’s done a lot for cycling awareness. I’d almost say he’s directly responsible for fewer cyclists being threatened by drivers on the road. That’s a good thing.

Still, on paper, this doesn’t exactly bode well:

1999, GC
1. Lance Armstrong
2. Alex Zülle - admitted doper; suspended
3. Fernando Escartín - ?

2000, GC
1. Lance Armstrong
2. Jan Ullrich - alleged doper; suspended / retired
3. Joseba Beloki - alleged doper; later cleared?

2001, GC
1. Lance Armstrong
2. Jan Ullrich - alleged doper; suspended / retired
3. Joseba Beloki - alleged doper; later cleared?

2002, GC
1. Lance Armstrong
2. Joseba Beloki - alleged doper; later cleared?
3. Raimondas Rumšas - alleged doper; suspended

2003, GC
1. Lance Armstrong
2. Jan Ullrich - alleged doper; suspended / retired
3. Alexander Vinokourov - alleged doper; suspended

2004, GC
1. Lance Armstrong
2. Andreas Klöden - alleged doper
3. Ivan Basso - alleged doper; suspended

2005, GC
1. Lance Armstrong
2. Ivan Basso - alleged doper; suspended
3. Jan Ullrich - alleged doper; suspended / retired

Self-regulation is a facade. The benchmark for sheer ridiculousness continues to rise. BP,...

Thu, 20 May 2010 22:16:00 -0400

Self-regulation is a facade.

The benchmark for sheer ridiculousness continues to rise. BP, Halliburton, and apparently everyone else involved in the oil disaster have absolutely no idea how to stop the leak.

They’ve actually resorted to using a “suggestion box,” which has thus far received thousands of ideas — 700 of them being fast tracked. Water-oil separating centrifuges are also being entertained, though they’ll only be used if someone else builds them.

As I was saying, pure self-regulation does not work. For-profit companies must inherently choose the options that maximize their bottom line, which is why there was no redundant safety mechanism in the “blowout preventer.” Additional backups rise operational costs, and businesses have an obligation to select the cheapest long-run option, always.

This extra overhead is why big companies hate government regulations and lobby like crazy to stop them. It hurts revenues. It has nothing to do with being morally against more government “control,” which is the messaging that gets passed to the general public.

Regardless, if the oil industry were more regulated, a drill tower would have more than a single blowout preventer containing 260 documented flaws.

Ironically, the costs attributed to the inevitable cleanup efforts in Louisiana will far exceed what a few extra backup mechanisms would have.

"From the outset, there’s been a sense that Hayward wasn’t quite prepared for this and didn’t quite..."

Tue, 18 May 2010 21:28:58 -0400

“

From the outset, there’s been a sense that Hayward wasn’t quite prepared for this and didn’t quite grasp what is at stake. The Wall Street Journal reported that Hayward “admitted that the oil giant had not the technology available to stop the leak. He also said in hindsight, it was ‘probably true’ that BP should have done more to prepare for such an emergency.”

As the spill worsened, Hayward fretted that he and BP were its victims. “What they hell have we done to deserve this?” he reportedly told fellow executives. Of course, Hayward isn’t the victim here. The sea life, the sea itself, the employees who died, the fishermen who are losing their livelihoods, the tourism industry, responsible drillers—they’re the victims. Hayward should have been asking himself: What they hell did they do to deserve this? And what am I going to do fix it?

The private grumbling has been matched by public bumbling. Hayward has used unfortunate metaphors. “We will only win this if we can win the hearts and minds of the local community,” he said, apparently unaware that “hearts and minds” is a phrase forever identified with the debacle of the Vietnam War. And in a moment of exquisitely bad taste, Hayward said: “Apollo 13 did not stop the space program. The Air France airplane that fell out of the sky off of Brazil did not stop the aviation industry.” Among the many crucial differences between Apollo 13 and this oil spill: Apollo 13 turned out to be a feel-good triumph of engineering, since the astronauts came home alive. The BP spill is simply an epic fail.

”

- Gross, on how BP CEO Tony Hayward is making the Gulf oil-spill disaster even worse (via newsweek)

Beyonce variations

Tue, 18 May 2010 10:12:32 -0400

Mary: or for a pre-nup
Mary: if you like what you see, then put a sig on it
Mary: then put a ring on it

The Science of Oil

Sun, 16 May 2010 13:58:08 -0400

Even though the oil industry is incredibly competitive and lucrative, it’s amazing that the combined knowledge of all parties responsible for the oil spill in Louisiana has amounted to a big metal cap to try to plug the leak.

After the initial failed attempt, which yielded the spontaneous creation of methane ice around the pipeline, it was obvious the entire rescue effort was being spearheaded by business executives and not scientists.

Now, the president, ostensibly sick of the bickering and band-aid approaches, has assembled a team of actual scientists to go Cold War-style on this oil spill.

As part of these efforts, I hope the team manages to develop a failsafe way to prevent spills like this from happening in the future. Our dependence on oil won’t be changing anytime soon, so any solution that makes drilling cleaner and safer is great.