CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (H.R. 3523), is a successor, of sorts, to the loathesome SOPA legislative proposal, which was shot down in flames earlier this year. EFF’s chilling analysis of the bill shows how it could be used to give copyright enforcers carte blanche to spy on Internet users and censoring the Internet (it would also give these powers to companies and governments who’d been embarrassed by sites like Wikileaks).
Does this equation makes sense?
Apple costs over $600 a share, and has nearly an unfathomable $100 billion in cash lying around. So is it any wonder its CEO is paid more than the national wealth of a small island nation?
Continue reading… “Tim Cook makes more than the GDP of the Kingdom of Tonga”
Last night saw the announcement of the 2012 nominees for science fiction’s prestigious Hugo Award. It’s a particularly fine ballot, reflecting a record number of nominating ballots (wisdom of the crowds and all that). Included on the ballot are our own moderator Avram (as part of the team that publishes The New York Review of Science Fiction) and one of my all-time favorite books, Among Others. Also noteworthy: the much-deserved John W Campbell Award nomination (for best new writer) for the fabulous Mur Lafferty, a nomination for the indispensable Science Fiction Encyclopedia, Third Edition, a nomination for IO9’s Charlie Jane Anders’s story Six Months, Three Days, and a fourth nomination for much-favored Fables graphic novels…
The upcoming Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, which will be attended by many latinamerican heads of state as well as Barack Obama, is set to be an historic debate over the legalization of drugs and the end of the war on drugs. Jamie Doward writes in the Guardian…
Continue reading… “Latin American leaders, Obama to discuss ending the war on drugs”
Distances are typically documented using specific measurement terms like inches, feet, and even miles. But when someone asks you how far it is to the mall, you’ll usually respond with a measurement of time instead of an exact number of miles…
Most of our childhoods were spent alternatingly dressing up like superheroes and playing with action figures in their likeness. Now you can combine the two by actually getting your own head on the body of your favorite superhero, like Batman or Superman, on one of these custom action figures.
All you’ve got to do is send Personalised Superhero Action Figures two photos of yourself—one portrait and one profile—and the company will use them to make your noggin into an action figure…
Continue reading… “Now you can turn yourself into a Batman Action Figure”
Imidacloprid is in a lot of commonly used products.
The likely culprit in sharp worldwide declines in honeybee colonies since 2006 is imidacloprid, one of the most widely used pesticides, according to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH)…
Continue reading… “Use of common pesticide, Imidacloprid, linked to Bee Colony Collapse”
What will the view be on the inside?
(Sorry, this was so brilliantly outrageous, we thought we’d play along.)
After filmmaker James Cameron set a depth record for exploring the Marianna Trench and Jeff Bezos found the engines from Apollo 11, entrepreneur Richard Branson felt a need to do something even more spectacular. The head of Virgin galactic is preparing to launch a journey to the center of the earth! The new company Virgin Volcanic, an offshoot of Virgin Galactic, has developed a vehicle called the VVS1 to tackle one of the Eight Grand Challenges – the Race to the Core.
Using patented carbon-carbon materials pioneered for deep space exploration, Virgin is proud to announce a revolutionary new vehicle, VVS1, which will be capable of plunging three people into the molten lava core of an active volcano…
Continue reading… “Richard Branson to explore the Center of the Earth – April Fools Day Joke”
New colors found utilizing lasers and ion cascades.
True, the pink is a lie. But a UC Santa Barbara research team has honestly just generated eleven new hues using lasers and ion cascades.
The team created the new colors by aiming a pair of lasers—one high-frequency, the other low-frequency—at a slab of semiconductor material, a gallium arsenide nanostructure. The high-frequency beam separates an electron from its host atom, generating what’s known as an exciton (a bonded pair consisting of a negatively-charged electron and a positively-charged host). The powerful, low frequency wave then accelerates the freed electron, which goes crashing into the electron-less atom in front of it. Since the electron has extra energy from the acceleration when it recombines with the host atom in front of it, that energy is radiated as light. Previously unseen frequencies of light…
Continue reading… “Physicists add 11 colors to the rainbow by tearing apart atoms”
Google’s self-driving cars have absolutely nothing to do with Google’s core business, and Google has never even tried to explain how they’re going to make money.
But so what? They’re really cool. They push technology forward. And as this video shows, they could make people’s lives better in real, tangible ways…
Continue reading… “Blind man takes a trip in one Of Google’s self-driving cars”
VenusAngelic, a prominent, 15-year-old member of online ball-jointed-doll fandom, describes how she uses cosmetics to make herself look like a doll, narrating it in a kind of whispering, Asian-inflected voice. I confess that this isn’t my subculture or interest, and VenusAngelic’s opening remarks, “Hello my dolly molly inky pinky cotton candy clouds!” are not the sort of thing that I’d be likely to say to other people. But VenusAngelic’s cultural identity seems to me to have the kind of deeply transgressive edge that characterizes the best teenaged subcultures, the kind of thing that evokes panicked, hostile, knee-jerk reactions from grownups. The YouTube comments on her video are a kind of pure, distilled youtubidity — vile, misogynist, patronizing, incoherent — which suggests that she’s touching a nerve…
Artist rendering of the Giant Magellan Telescope
Astronomers have begun to blast 3 million cubic feet of rock from a mountaintop in the Chilean Andes to make room for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), the world’s largest telescope when completed near the end of the decade. The GMT will help astronomers probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy – mysterious forms of matter and energy that allow galaxies to form while the expansion of the Universe accelerates…
