General technology, not anything in particular
Our Japanese-language writer used to give himself a pass, until he encountered a woman who changed his mind. If you’ve watched many Japanese TV drama or anime series, you’ve no doubt come across a scene where someone sits down for a meal and says “Itadakimasu” before beginning to eat, often accompanied by an awkwardly phrased…
This New York store has only just opened and already the Internet’s gone into meltdown over their unique Japanese-influenced ice creams! One of Japan’s most well-known sweets is a fish-shaped cake called taiyaki, which literally translates to “baked sea bream”. Made with a rich waffle or pancake batter and traditionally filled with a sweet adzuki red bean…
via New Yorkers go crazy for taiyaki fish ice creams — RocketNews24
Very interesting rebuttal to a Susan Fiske editorial criticizing the criticizers in her field of Social Psychology. Lots of history and current practices are taken into account. And you have to read all the well written comments, too. I will say it gives me hope that Academia can police itself well when it comes to research and rigor. Kudos to all the contributors. This is what the Ineternet was intended to do, further dialog and maybe, hopefully foster progress.
I thought it might be interesting to look at my last chunk of emails by what hour they were answered. It does seem to show some patterns. Some that may not be healthy for any real separation between on/off work hours. It is good that I’ve got no email in the 1AM to 5AM zone.…
via Email Support Data — Bionic Teaching
Around the time I was busted down from salary to hourly employment, I too spent my free hours doing “work”. Checking email, occasionally answering it outside regular business hours. But 1 year ago (more like 10 months ago), we all got reclassified where I work so that we could “earn” overtime. My solution was to not do anything worthy of overtime and that soaked up the worry I had of not doing enough to earn my wages. So outside regular business days and hours, I don’t check mail because if I reply to it, that’s “work”. So the easiest thing is to just not check it until start of business the following day. That’s how punch clocks work, whether they are real or virtual.
Just look at this gorgeous machine. Released in 1989 by Sharp, only in Japan, its purpose was to allow better video capture of Famicom (NES) games. Read more about its history in and use in this Kotaku post. I mostly lust for those controllers with the big “1” and “2” graphics on them.
via Famicom Titler — Jean Snow [.net]
Kudos to Jean Snow for sharing this from Kotaku website. I love little obscure product back channels where engineers worked really hard on a product that got little marketing or sales. It’s beautiful to look at, but the idea that people would want to record their game play on Famicom is very interesting.
Last year I took a trip to Washington DC, and I was disappointed to see all the work being done on the Capitol. Now it looks like all that was for the good and it’s starting to wind down and finish finally.
Last week, a friend who lives in Washington DC posted a picture of the U.S. Capitol and was excited to see the scaffolding that has obscured the beautiful dome for two years coming down.
For those who have been to DC in the last couple of years, it’s been disappointing to not be able to see the dome, and also to realize that the Rotunda is obscured too behind safety netting. But it’s been for a good cause, the preservation of the cast iron dome and the murals in the Rotunda, according to the Architect of the U.S. Capitol:
Why is the Capitol Dome under restoration?
Because the Capitol Dome is predominately made of cast iron, exposure to rain, snow, sleet and sun causes damage to its exterior. Water infiltrates through pin holes in the Statue of Freedom, and through cracks and open joints throughout the exterior shell…
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It’s just ten days since I pointed to a Microsoft security leak as proof of my point that any iPhone master key created by Apple would inevitably fall into the wrong hands in time – and even more powerful support for that position now exists. It was revealed last week that powerful hacking tools created by…
I’m relieved there’s now anecdotal evidence that single keys to allow security services access to devices is bad. Apple was right to defy the FBI in court and knowing NSA cannot keep their tools under wraps further emphasizes how bad things could get. The war on the Internet is just beginning I fear.
Yeah, we know, you’ve heard it all before. It sometimes feels like some revolutionary new battery technology gets promoted every other month, and the one thing they have in common is that they never seem to materialize in real-life products. But new battery tech from a MIT spinoff may actually prove to be the exception, with the…
via New lithium metal tech holds out promise of double-life batteries by 2017 — 9to5Mac
If this technology from MIT is every bit as “manufacturable” as other existing battery tech, then I’m all for it. But as is often the case, even with University offices setup to “commercialize” pure research, the promise far outstrips the practicality. I can point to the promise of using graphene (thin sheets of graphite in a crystalline lattice work) in all sorts of applications, even lithium ion battery anodes! But have you seen anyone deliver a product yet based on all the research and announcements of discoveries in using graphene? It’s darned few if any. And those few niches where it might see light of day, are very high end, aerospace or military applications that may never make it in the commercial sector. Still there’s some hope this one might break the pattern of typical obscurity these technologies fall into. And I for one would love to see an existing battery form factor (say from Apple MacBook Pro line for example) double in total capacity. Imagine a 13″ MacBook Pro lasting for 24 hours or even 22 hours on a single charge? That would be quite something indeed. We’re still not there yet. But hoping this comes true.
by Stephen Mullen Things to Come, released in 1936, a collaboration between H. G. Wells, Alexander Korda, William Cameron Menzies, and a host of illustrious others, is a bit of an odd duck. Gorgeous looking, with stunning imagery (pre-apocalyptic, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic and utopian), even more stunning montage sequences, fantastic music, and – well, a star-studded […]
via 62. Things to Come (1936) — Wonders in the Dark
I’m a big fan of Metropolis (1927) and any film made prior to 2001: A Space Odyssey that portends to portray the future is worthy of my notice. I still haven’t seen this film, but the name hovers in the back of my mind all the time. Someday I will see this film. But for now thanks to the wonder of personal blogs and devoted amateurs Wonders In The Dark does a great job of revisiting these films hanging in the back of my mind. I’m reminded I still haven’t seen them and become even slightly more motivated to seek them out and watch them.
We managed to grab a few pictures of Micron’s new 3D XPoint-powered QuantX SSD, and the company also provided performance results and endurance information.
via 3D XPoint SSD Pictured, Performance And Endurance Revealed At FMS — News Tom’s Hardware
3D XPoint is an invention of Intel to re-architect NAND based flash memory and make it much higher performance. The goal is to achieve an Non-volatile DIMM memory that could possibly be mixed with RAM modules and be a 2nd tier of memory between RAM and even now current SSDs. The speed increase touted is 1000X faster tha NAND. But from this article you can quickly glean that turning a memory technology into a marketable product comes with many, many compromises. And not least of which is turning 3D Xpoint into an SSD. Apparently this forces many interrupts on the buses read/write as an I/O occurs. Then all that gets stuck behind a SATA-NAND memory controller. Eventually all this needs to be hung off a SATA cable or bridge chip that talks to a CPU or PCIe bus. But hopes are still high for the NVDIMM version which hopefully can get closer to achieving the 1000X faster promises. So little in new announcements have come out regarding NVDIMMs in part due to lawsuits between intellectual property holders and licensees of that property. Some of those cases are ongoing and this announcement points to a possible less litigation filled future for NVDIMMs, I hope.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 