Posts Tagged ‘funny’

sciencehabit writes “Show a native-born Chinese person a picture of the Great Wall, and suddenly they’ll have trouble speaking English, even if they usually speak it fluently. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that reminders of our home country can complicate our ability to speak a new language. The findings could help explain why cultural immersion is the most effective way to learn a foreign tongue and why immigrants who settle within an ethnic enclave acculturate more slowly than those who surround themselves with friends from their new country.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Trying To Learn a Foreign Language? Avoid Reminders of Home

Rejoice! For Carl Hiaasen, author of the funniest crime novels in the business, bar none, has a new book out! Bad Monkey has just arrived on shelves and it is every bit as hilarious as you could hope — I spent the weekend reading choice bits aloud to whomever I could grab, and giggling noisily to myself when no one was around.        

Originally posted here:
Carl Hiaasen’s Bad Monkey

Laina, AKA “Overly Attached Girlfriend” (a YouTube comedian and memestar who trades on her ability to stare intensely while monologuing hilariously about her terrifying romantic attachment) has outdone herself with an Uncle Sam edition, commenting on Prism Overly Attached Uncle Sam        

Original post:
Overly Attached Girlfriend on Prism

coondoggie writes “NASA today said it would team up with Lego to offer a competition to see who can build the coolest models of future airplanes and spacecraft. The ‘NASA’s Missions: Imagine and Build’ competition is open now with an entry deadline of July 31. Winners in each category will be selected by a panel of NASA and LEGO officials and announced Sept. 1.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NASA Teams With LEGO To Offer Model Competition

It’s been just over a year since Anno NTK launched , a kind of Wayback Machine for the wonderful old-school UK tech newsletter Need to Know. Each week, Danny O’Brien will send you a fifteen-year-old edition of NTK, letting you catch up on the tech news of the late 1990s.        

Excerpt from:
Anno NTK: 15-year-old tech news just keeps on getting better

cylonlover writes “Science fiction may well become reality with the development of a real life Iron Man suit that would allow astronauts or extreme thrill seekers to space dive from up to 62 miles (100 km) above the Earth’s surface at the very edge of space, and safely land using thruster boots instead of a parachute. Hi-tech inventors over at Solar System Express (Sol-X) and biotech designers Juxtopia LLC (JLLC) are collaborating on this project with a goal of releasing a production model of such a suit by 2016. The project will use a commercial space suit to which will be added augmented reality (AR) goggles, jet packs, power gloves and movement gyros.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Space Diving: Iron Man Meets Star Trek Suit In Development

“Here’s that bad advice you were hoping for” is a Tumblr that picks out letters to advice columns (as well as direct requests from readers) and writes scathing, hilarious responses: NYT, Social Q’s, 24 May 2013: Our group of close friends has spent the last few years attending one another’s weddings. More        

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Excellent bad advice

An anonymous reader writes “Kepler may be down, but now NASA has another planet-hunting tool in mind. The space agency is preparing the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) observatory in order to follow in Kepler’s footsteps. NASA has been searching for alien planets for several years now. Learning about strange exoplanets such as enormous, hot ‘Jupiters’ and ‘rogue planets’ that actually cruise through space without a parent star certainly adds to the body of research concerning our universe. Yet what scientists are really interested in are the Earth-like planets that may hold the potential for life.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NASA TESS Observatory Will Hunt For Alien Life On "Super-Earth" Exoplanets

Hamburg writes “Stack Exchange launched a new site for network engineers. It’s in question and answer style, content is tagged for filtering and subscribing to topics. A voting system supports quality of posts, leading to so called reputation scores which determine moderation capabilities of the users. It’s now 18 days in beta, at this early stage users decide which way it will go, from quality and kind of contributions up to the future design of the site. People there discuss mainly professional subjects such as the best dual-provider design for the enterprise, when to choose fiber instead of copper cabling, and efficient ways for troubleshooting switching loops.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Network Engineering Q&A Site Launched

Mat Ricardo sez, “Here’s what happened last time Piff The Magic Dragon (and Mr. Piffles the dog!) was a guest on Mat Ricardo’s London Varieties. What’s going to happen when he pays us a return visit, this Thursday night at London’s Leicester Square Theatre?        

Original post:
Doing a tablecloth yank from beneath a dog in a dragon suit

An anonymous reader writes “A very recent paper in the prestigious biology journal Cell — ‘Human Embryonic Stem Cells Derived by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer’ (openly accessible) — reports the novel creation of human embryonic stem cells from somatic nuclei. It has received massive media coverage and is surely penciled in as a strong candidate for scientific publication of the year. It does however have several examples of image reuse that have been pointed out by a submission on PubPeer. In the paper, it is recorded that the journal Cell accepted this paper just 4 days after submission. Perhaps, under the circumstances, the pre-publication peer review had to be a little hasty?

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Human Stem Cell Cloning Paper Contains Reused Images

EFF is celebrating the new inductees into its Takedown Hall of Shame with a new cooking show! In this episode, EFF staffer Parker Higgins bakes a “Mean Spirited Censorship Pie” — which is what all have to call the classic Southern dessert formerly known as “Derby Pie,” now that Kern’s Kitchen in Louisville is threatening        

Continue reading here:
Bake a Mean Spirited Censorship Pie with the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Indiana University has replaced their supercomputer, Big Red, with a new system predictably named Big Red II. At the dedication HPC scientist Paul Messina said: “It’s important that this is a university-owned resource. … Here you have the opportunity to have your own faculty, staff and students get access with very little difficulty to this wonderful resource.” From the article: “Big Red II is a Cray-built machine, which uses both GPU-enabled and standard CPU compute nodes to deliver a petaflop — or 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second — of max performance. Each of the 344 CPU nodes uses two 16-core AMD Abu Dhabi processors, while the 676 GPU nodes use one 16-core AMD Interlagos and one NVIDIA Kepler K20.” Read more of this story at Slashdot

Continue Reading:
Indiana University Dedicates Biggest College-Owned Supercomputer

An anonymous reader writes “Two men were arrested in Canada, accused of conspiring to carry out an ‘al-Qaeda supported’ attack against a VIA passenger train in the Greater Toronto Area. The arrests were products of ‘extensive’ co-operation between Canadian and US intelligence agencies, who had been investigating the plot since August 2012.” From this article, it’s not clear whether any actual al-Qaeda support was forthcoming, or whether the accused plotters merely thought there was, by means of an FBI sting operation, as in the 2006 case in Florida. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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RCMP Says Terror Plot Against Canadian Trains Thwarted

Technically, lending Bill these particular shades is a terms-of-service violation — wonder if Google will revoke them? William Gibson, Google Glass        

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William Gibson tries the Google Glass

An anonymous reader writes “With the latest development work on Clang ahead of the release of LLVM version 3.3, Clang is now C++11 feature complete. The last remaining features of the ISO C++11 feature specification have been implemented. C++11 support for GCC is also more or less complete.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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LLVM Clang Compiler Now C++11 Feature Complete

First time accepted submitter occidental writes in about Etsy’s push to get more women engineers. “You’ve probably heard of Etsy, the bustling online marketplace for crafters and artists. You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that most of its customers are women, both buyers and sellers. Ditto that the Etsy team is a pretty good representation of the Earth’s gender ratio. Yet when Marc Hedlund took the helm of Etsy’s Product Development & Engineering department, 97% of the engineering department were men

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Changing the Ratio of Women In Tech: How Etsy Did It

New submitter JonOomph writes “Director Alex Cox, the creator of Repo Man and Sid and Nancy, is making plans via Kickstarter for his next film, Bill, the Galactic Hero, a feature-length science fiction comedy set in the far reaches of our galaxy. He is challenging the norm by shooting the film on 35mm monochrome (black and white) film, possibly the last film to ever attempt this, and possibly the first feature film to be edited with popular open source video editor OpenShot.” If you don’t like spoilers, I suggest reading this short but fascinating piece on Repo Man (one of my all-time favorite movies) only after watching it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
Repo Man Director Alex Cox Plans To Edit Next Film With OpenShot

Peter Eckersley writes “At the EFF we were recently contacted by the organisers of the Melbourne Free University (MFU), an Australian community education group, whose website had been unreachable from a number of Australian ISPs since the 4th of April. It turns out that the IP address of MFU’s virtual host has been black-holed by several Australian networks; there is suggestive but not conclusive evidence that this is a result of some sort of government request or order. It is possible that MFU and 1200 other sites that use that IP address are the victims of a block that was put in place for some other reason. Further technical analysis and commentary is in our blog post.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Australian Networks Block Community University Website

Projectophile’s Clare has a funny post about the hazards presented by beautiful mid-century modern home designs to children. My grandparents had a proper split-level MCM when I was a kid, and it’s a wonder we survived. As Clare says, “I love open, flowing space as much as the next modern girl. But I know it        

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Mid-Century Modern housing designs vs children

As far back as the 1920s, smart musicians have known that your ability to hit the notes isn’t nearly so important as your ability to vamp. Vamping

Taken from:
Why PLAY pie-anna when you can VAMP?

DeviceGuru writes “Many of us have griped for years about Roku’s retro one-dimensional user interface. Finally, in conjunction with the release of the new Roku 3 model, the Linux-based media streaming player is getting a two-dimensional facelift, making it quicker and easier to access favorite channels and find new ones. Current Roku users, who will now begin suffering from UI-envy, will be glad to learn that Roku plans to push out a firmware update next month to many earlier models, including the Roku LT, Roku HD (model 2500R), Roku 2 HD, Roku 2 XD, Roku 2 XS, and Roku Streaming Stick. A short demo of the new 2D Roku menu system is available in this YouTube video.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Roku Finally Gets a 2D Menu System

waderoush writes “How many electronic gadgets did you own in 2005? How many do you own today? The answer is almost certainly a lot fewer. Counter to the dominant trend in consumer technology since the 1920s — and despite predictions of a coming ‘Internet of things’ — there may actually be *less* electronic stuff in our homes and offices today than ever before.

Read more here:
Where Have All the Gadgets Gone?

Nerval’s Lobster writes “The Green Grid, which helped popularize metrics for minimizing wasted electricity in data centers, has developed a new method for cutting down on wasted electronics as old servers and other equipment reach their inevitable retirement. The Electronics Disposal Efficiency metric is designed to help minimize electronic waste, specifically servers and other enterprise hardware. It will take a cue from other organizations, including the Solving the E-waste Problem (StEP) Initiative. The Green Grid is trying to build on established regulations that govern the disposal of consumer electronics such as televisions, including the rules governing Waste Electronics and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) within the EU. The metric isn’t concerned with whether equipment has been reused or recycled, or where it’s broken down into component parts

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The Green Grid Publishes New Data Center Recycling Metric

crookedvulture writes “Seagate’s has revealed its next-generation hybrid drives, and for the first time, there’s a 3.5″ desktop model in the mix. The new family of so-called SSHDs includes standard and slim notebook variants with 500GB and 1TB capacities, plus 1TB and 2TB desktop versions. All of them combine mechanical platters with 8GB of NAND in a dual-mode SLC/MLC configuration. The SLC component is largely reserved to cache host writes, while the MLC portion is filled with frequently accessed data to speed read performance. Despite MLC NAND’s lower write endurance, Seagate claims the SSHDs have more than enough headroom to last at least five years with typical client workloads.

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Seagate’s New SSHD Hybrids Have Dual-Mode Flash Caches