LOW-TECH MAGAZINE: The Revenge of the Circulating Fan
The steadfast rotating fan has been employed to keep people cool since the eighteenth century, and it remains highly effective, requiring much less energy and providing more comfort than air-conditioning. Cooling people by increasing local airflow is at least ten times more energy efficient than ref…
How the global banana industry is killing the world’s favorite fruit
During harvest last year, banana farmers in Jordan and Mozambique made a chilling discovery. Their plants were no longer bearing the soft, creamy fruits they'd been growing for decades. When they cut open the roots of their banana plants, they saw something that looked like this: Scientists first di…
Hasnain says:
"But the GMO lightning rod distracts from the larger cautionary tale: Our reliance on monoculture to feed surging global populations is catching up with us. International agricultural organizations are already scrambling to find new scourge-resistant substitutes for things like rice and potatoes. In fact, so dire are other global agricultural problems that Tropical Race 4’s onslaught doesn’t even get bananas near the top of priority list. “Getting support to develop new resistant bananas is really tough—there are already so many demands on the international agricultural community,” says Ploetz. “There’s a lot of hunger in the world and bananas just have to get in line behind all those other big problems.”"
Posted on 2014-09-11T20:03:28+0000
The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious
How the worst apple took over the United States, and continues to spread
Hasnain says:
"As genes for beauty were favored over those for taste, the skins grew tough and bitter around mushy, sugar-soaked flesh."
Posted on 2014-09-11T20:02:49+0000
Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me A Spreadsheet
In mid-August, couples and lonely hearts packed a Brooklyn basement to hear scientists make sense of something the crowd could not: love. It was the 11th meeting of the Empiricist League, a kind of...
Hasnain says:
"But if submitting to Big Data is what’s required, are we interested in telling it? Rudder started writing the book in a pre-Edward Snowden era, when the conversation about data was largely about its possibilities, not its perils. There’s a telling passage early in the book when Rudder writes, “If Big Data’s two running stories have been surveillance and money, for the last three years I’ve been working on a third: the human story.” But that doesn’t go quite far enough. These days, isn’t the human story a combination of surveillance and money?"
Posted on 2014-09-10T04:43:21+0000
Sweat the small stuff - inconshreveable
ngrok is a tunneling, reverse proxy that establishes secure tunnels from a public endpoint to a locally running network service while capturing all traffic for inspection and replay. It is an open-source project on GitHub.
Seniors and the generation spending gap - Macleans.ca
Why are we doing so much to try to help seniors when they’re already the wealthiest generation in history?
Hasnain says:
"The battle over how cash-strapped governments should divvy up their limited resources between young and old is only likely to heat up as the biggest wave of Baby Boomers enters retirement over the next decade. But it’s a battle worth waging—unless we want today’s seniors to be the last generation of Canadians living in retirement bliss."
Posted on 2014-09-10T01:49:06+0000
Genetic testing brings families together: And sometimes tears them apart
Thousands of people use 23andMe to seek out long-lost family members. They're not always prepared for what they find. And new changes to the service's settings could lead to even more of these revelations.
Hasnain says:
"As the market grows and more and more people log in, services like 23andMe may well become the Google of our personal genetics. Except instead of acting as the gatekeeper for a search query on how to cook a steak, they will be the guardians of our collective DNA. With quiet changes to their privacy settings, the company is already determining whether and how we have family secrets revealed and how we learn about our histories. It's already controlling the narrative of our genes"
Posted on 2014-09-10T01:46:38+0000
With genetic testing, I gave my parents the gift of divorce
One biologist's story of how genetic testing broke his family apart.
Hasnain says:
"At first, I was thinking this is the coolest genetics story, my own personal genetics story. I wasn't particularly upset about it initially, until the rest of the family found out. Their reaction was different. Years of repressed memories and emotions uncorked and resulted in tumultuous times that have torn my nuclear family apart. My parents divorced. No one is talking to my dad. We're not anywhere close to being healed yet and I don't know how long it will take to put the pieces back together. "
Posted on 2014-09-10T01:45:31+0000
Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang
Microsoft is in serious discussions to buy Mojang, the Swedish company behind the popular "Minecraft" videogame, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
Steve Ballmer did not write the text for the blue screen of death - The Old New Thing - Site...
Somehow, it ended up widely reported that Steve Ballmer wrote the blue screen of death. And all of those articles cited my article titled "Who wrote the text for the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog in Windows 3.1?" Somehow, everybody decided to ignore that I wrote "Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog" and replace it with what…
Hasnain says:
The amount of mis-reporting in news can be quite scary.
Posted on 2014-09-09T16:36:19+0000