How does that even happen? Those things might be filled with air but it isn't helium and it should be heavy enough not to be lifted by the wind although clearly that's wrong. 50 feet? That's amazing and terrifying.
You'd think staying in the tallest skyscraper in London would afford you some privacy. But visitors at the newly-opened hotel inside of the Shard are being creeped out by the bizarre effects of a simple design flawwhich reflects the view inside of certain rooms directly onto the windows of nearby guests at night.
According to The Guardian, a mistake in architect Renzo Piano's detailing means that visitors to the Shangri-La Hotel are getting a perfect view into other rooms. And this isn't your average Rear Window-type of situation you might find at hotels like the Standard in Manhattan, where guests knowingly show off inside of their glass-walled rooms. Because, in this case, visitors don't realize they're on display.
You see, the edges of Piano's Shard jut out past the flat planes of the building's facadeit's a formal flourish that gives the building its crystalline appearance. But when the lights are on in any given room, the projecting glass edges act as mirrors beaming a reflection of one room's interior onto the windows of another.
The hotel's manager, presumably in a state of extreme panic, had the following to say about the little issue: "In some rooms, due to the unique shape of the Shard, guests may be able to glimpse into a neighbour's room. For this, blinds are available for guest privacy." That's a sadly earnest commentafter all, here in New York, hotels actually use exhibitionism as a sales pitch.
Problem: Too many chickens don't have room to roam around and be happy. Solution: Strap virtual reality headsets onto said chickens so they think they're free-range. No seriously, an assistant professor at Iowa State University seems to think this is a good idea, but he has to be kidding. Right? RIGHT?!
Austin Stewart recently launched a bewilderingly straight-faced website for a project called Second Livestock, a sort of Second Life for farm animals. It would involve outfitting livestock with special Oculus Rift-like devices so that they can enjoy a virtual world of fun and feigned freedom. There's no need for farmers to provide the physical space required for a true free-range experience, you can just fool them. Stewart's is also giving Ted-like presentations to audiences across the Midwest.
But the more you hear about this so-called Virtual Free Range idea, (i.e. anything at all) the more obvious it becomes that it's a joke, or at least some weird social experiment. "It's as much about animal husbandry as it is about human husbandry," Stewart said at one of these talks. "We live in little boxes, we work in little boxes, and then we're engaging in these virtual environments more. Why wouldn't chickens choose the same thing?"
All that said, Stewart's playing it all incredibly straight. He is known for his penchant for absurdity, though, and the Second Livestock project fits neatly into a larger portfolio of projects that look at silly technological solutions to simple human problems. It's still funny to imagine the Kentucky Fried Matrix though.
Earlier this week the World Health Organisation ranked the globe's biggest drinking nationsbut it didn't quite tell the entire story. This is what the data looks like if you ignore abstainers.
Those pesky non-drinkers skew the average slightly, you see. While most of Belarusthe highest consuming nation according to the WHOdrinks, then, it doesn't mean that it drinks as hard as the minority number of soaks in other countries. So The Economist took the WHO data, stripped out the abstainers, and looked at the results afresh.
Turns out that while almost 90 percent of Chad's population don't drink, the 780,000 drinkers it is home to put away almost 34 liters of pure alcohol a year. Compare that to the Belarus, where people put away just 17.5 liters averaged across the population, and clearly the guys in Chad party pretty damn hard. Similarly for UAE and Gambia. The UK and U.S. still languish down the table, though.
Mind = Blown
This is really amazing and beautiful: Chocolate etched with rainbow holograms using a technique that doesn't use additives of any kind, but rather carves specific microstructures into the chocolate's surface that defract lightmuch the same way that the security holograms on credit cards work.
Developed by Swiss design company, Morphotonix, working with a German chocolate mould manufacturer, the designs are etched onto a metal master mould, from which softer plastic moulds are pressed and are then filled with molten chocolatenot unlike how vinyl records are made.
While both milk and dark chocolate work, some specific varieties are incompatible with the moulding process (because physics). As Morphotonix CEO Veronica Savu explained to New Scientist, "We have been testing it with many types of chocolate. Sometimes it works great and sometimes no matter how hard we try it doesn't mould."
The hologram technology, which Morphotonix first began developing in 2012, has just been unveiled at the Interpack packaging trade fair in Düsseldorf, Germany. There's no word on when the these shiny, tasty treats will hit store shelves or when the moulds will be available for home chocolatiers.
Sandvine just released its twice yearly report on internet traffic, and it's a doozy. While it's no surprise to see mobile growing and Snapchat kicking ass, it's a little bit mind-bending to learn that binge-watching streaming addicts gobble up over half the traffic on the internet in North America. That's a lot of Netflix.
To be specific, the top 15th percentile of internet users accounts for about 54 percent of total monthly network traffic. Sandvine, a sort of Canadian Cisco, labels these folks as "subscribers who exhibit 'cord cutting' behavior" or, simply, "cord cutters." Yes, with the scare quotes. Probably because it's hard to tell who's actually ditched cable versus who just likes to watch video online.
Sandvine admits in the report that while they were "unable to resolve if these subscribers have 'cut the cord,' their usage profile indicates that they are likely using streaming as a primary form of entertainment." And since that top 15th percentile consumes about 100 hours of streaming video a month, 11 times the amount that normal people do, it's hard to imagine when they'd also have time to watch cable.
That's a lot of Netflixand YouTube and Hulu and everything else. But mostly Netflix, which accounts for over 34 percent of all downstream traffic in the United States. YouTube is a distant second at 13 percent. In total, real-time entertainment makes up nearly 64 percent of total network traffic. And that percentage will only go up as video streaming sites continue to grow.
The Sandvine report includes a few more interesting factoids, like that Snapchat is the most popular messaging app in North America and that Twitch.TV generates more traffic that HBO GO in the United States. Meanwhile, this year's impending World Cup is expected to account for almost half the traffic in Latin American countries. You can download the report for yourself, but honestly, the red in this graph says it all:
That Ice Cream Truck Song From Your Childhood Is Actually Racist
Is there anything from back in the day that wasn't racist?
And the cable companies fear it, as per your post on Comcast limiting data caps. If things keep going the way they do we'll end up with a throttled internet controlled by a handful of megacorporations who nickel and dime you and every competitor for whatever they can get.
That Ice Cream Truck Song From Your Childhood Is Actually Racist
One Man's Insane Plan to Make Oculus Rifts for Chickens
http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/15/an...mals-the-freedom-to-roam-without-the-roaming/
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