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"The project took five years and $15 million dollars before the first field test hit a slight snag when the bugged kitty was released near a Russian compound in Washington and was immediately hit by a car while crossing the street. The project was ended soon after."
Real talk: It is as if you held a mirror to my life. |
The strange, surprisingly radical roots of the shopping mall
Nov 29, 2016 / Steven Johnson https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...d6ea87a66d.png Victor Gruen was an avant-garde European socialist who inadvertently designed that all-American creature, the mall. But, as Steven Johnson reveals, his master plan was way grander — and one we might want to build today. Go to Minnesota, follow Route 35 southwest of Minneapolis to the suburban town of Edina, and take the exit onto West 66th Street. You will eventually find a building complex floating like an island in a gray sea of parking, its exterior a jumbled mix of branded facades: GameStop, P.F. Chang’s, AMC Cinemas. Although this building looks unremarkable, it ended up defining an era: It is the Southdale Center, America’s first mall. Today’s malls have a mostly well-deserved reputation for being the ugly stepchild of consumer capitalism, but their intellectual lineage is more complex than most people realize. While it would come to epitomize the cultural wasteland of postwar suburbia, the shopping mall was the brainchild of an avant-garde European socialist named Victor Gruen. Born in Vienna around the turn of the century, Gruen grew up, as his biographer M. Jeffrey Hardwick puts it, “in the dying embers of [Vienna’s] vibrant, aesthetic life.” He studied architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, working under the socialist urban planners then in vogue. He built up a fledgling practice designing fashionable storefronts, and he designed but never built one large-scale public-housing project. Like many left-wing Jewish intellectuals, Gruen fled to the US as the Nazis began marching across Europe. He arrived in America in 1938 not speaking a word of English, but by the next year he was designing boutiques on Fifth Avenue. He developed a signature style in his shop designs, with open-air arcade entrances flanked by giant plate-glass displays arrayed with goods. During the 1940s, his practice boomed; he built dozens of department stores across America. Echoing Le Corbusier’s famous line about a house being a “machine for living,” Gruen called his store environments “machines for selling.” https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...6b4d01d038.jpg Yet Gruen never fully left his Viennese radical upbringing and its faith in the potential of large-scale planned communities. He hated the noisy, crass commercialism of unregulated spaces. In the 1950s, he gave a speech in which he denounced the banal landscapes of the post-war suburbs, calling them “avenues of horror … flanked by the greatest collection of vulgarity — billboards, motels, gas stations, shanties, car lots, miscellaneous industrial equipment, hot dog stands, wayside stores — ever collected by mankind.” In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Gruen began exploring more ambitious designs, and in 1956, just a few months after Disneyland opened its gates in California, Gruen completed work on Southdale Center. He designed Southdale as a two-level structure linked by opposing escalators, featuring a few dozen stores arrayed around a shared courtyard, protected from the weather by a roof. He modeled it after the European arcades that had flourished in Vienna and other cities in the early 19th century. But to modern eyes, the reference to European urbanity is lost: Southdale Center is, inescapably, a shopping mall. Southdale was an immediate hit, attracting almost as much hyperbolic praise as Walt Disney’s park. “The strikingly handsome and colorful center is constantly crowded,” Fortune announced. “The sparkling lights and bright colors provide a continuous invitation to look up ahead, to stroll onto the next store, and to buy.” Most commentators focused on the vast courtyard space, which Gruen had dubbed the “garden court of perpetual spring,” where shoppers could enjoy sculptures, children’s carnivals, cafes, eucalyptus and magnolia trees, birdcages, and dozens of other diversions. https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...f26ae8eeb1.png Gruen’s design for Southdale would become the single most influential new building archetype of the postwar era. Just as Louis Sullivan’s original skyscrapers defined urban skylines of the first half of the 1920s, Gruen’s mall proliferated, first in suburban America and then around the globe. Originally conceived as a way to escape the harsh Minnesota winters, Gruen’s enclosed public space accelerated the mass migration to desert and tropical climates made possible by the invention of air-conditioning. Today the fifteen largest shopping malls in the world are all located outside the US and Europe, and two-thirds are in countries with warm climates such as the Philippines, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Thailand. And while the mall itself would expand in scale prodigiously, the basic template would remain constant: two to three floors of shops surrounding an enclosed courtyard, connected by escalators. But there is a tragic irony behind his success. The mall itself was only a small part of Gruen’s design for Southdale. His real vision was for a dense, mixed-use, pedestrian-based urban center with residential apartments, schools, medical centers, outdoor parks and office buildings. The mall courtyard and its pedestrian convenience were for Gruen a way to smuggle European metropolitan values into a barbaric American suburban wasteland. Yet developers never took to Gruen’s larger vision. Instead of surrounding the shopping center with high-density, mixed-used developments, they surrounded it with parking lots. They replaced his courtyard carnival with food courts. Communities did blossom around the new malls, but they were largely uncoordinated developments of low-density, single-family homes. Of course, suburbanization had many winds in its sails, but Gruen’s shopping mall was one of the strongest. Southdale was going to be the antidote to suburban sprawl. Instead it became an amplifier. Gruen’s ideas nonetheless attracted one devoted fan who had the financial resources to put them into action: Walt Disney. The 1955 launch of Disneyland was a staggering success, but the triumph of the planned environment inside the park created a kind of opposing reaction in the acres outside, which were swiftly converted from orange groves into cheap motels, gas stations and billboards. Disney grew increasingly repulsed by the blight and so he began plotting to construct a second-generation project where he could control the whole environment, not just the theme park but the entire community around it. Disney planned to design an entire functioning city from scratch, one that would reinvent almost every single element of the modern urban experience. He dubbed it EPCOT, short for Experimental Planned City of Tomorrow. While the Disney Corporation would eventually build a future-themed amusement park named EPCOT, it had nothing to do with Disney’s vision, which would have been a true community with full-time residents, not another tourist attraction. https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...012d34cb18.jpg During his exploratory research, Disney fell under the spell of Gruen. Gruen had included kind words about Disneyland in his book The Heart of Our Cities and he shared Disney’s contempt for the sprawling “avenues of horror” that had proliferated around the theme park. And so when Disney decided to buy a vast swath of swampland in central Florida and build a “Progress City” — as he called it — Gruen was the perfect patron saint for the project. Like Gruen’s original plan for Southdale, it was going to be an entire community oriented around a mall. Disney’s Progress City was to be profoundly anti-automobile. At the center of the city was a zone that Gruen had called the Pedshed, defined by the desirable walking distance of the average citizen. Cars would be banned from the Pedshed area, and new modes of transportation would appear to get residents downtown. Just as in Disney’s theme parks, all supply and service vehicles would be routed below the city through a network of underground tunnels. However, Disney died of cancer in 1966 while his project was still in the planning stages. Why wasn’t a Progress City built? The easiest way to dismiss the Gruen/EPCOT vision is to focus on its having a shopping mall at its core. But the mall is too distracting a scapegoat and diverts the eye from the other elements that actually have value. The fact that urban critic Jane Jacobs, who had an intense antipathy to top-down planners, saw merit in the Gruen model should tell us something. Clearing out automobiles from entire downtowns; building mixed-use dense housing in suburban regions; creating distinct mass-transit options to fit the scale of the average trips; outing services below ground — these are all provocative ideas that have been explored separately in many communities. But to this day no one has built a true Progress City — which means we have no real idea how transformative it might be to see all these ideas deployed simultaneously. Mall or no mall, perhaps it’s time we tried. https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...4b0c5cda04.png Disney’s Progress City was to be profoundly anti-automobile. At the center of the city was a zone that Gruen had called the Pedshed, defined by the desirable walking distance of the average citizen. Cars would be banned from the Pedshed area, and new modes of transportation would appear to get residents downtown. Just as in Disney’s theme parks, all supply and service vehicles would be routed below the city through a network of underground tunnels. However, Disney died of cancer in 1966 while his project was still in the planning stages. Why wasn’t a Progress City built? The easiest way to dismiss the Gruen/EPCOT vision is to focus on its having a shopping mall at its core. But the mall is too distracting a scapegoat and diverts the eye from the other elements that actually have value. The fact that urban critic Jane Jacobs, who had an intense antipathy to top-down planners, saw merit in the Gruen model should tell us something. Clearing out automobiles from entire downtowns; building mixed-use dense housing in suburban regions; creating distinct mass-transit options to fit the scale of the average trips; outing services below ground — these are all provocative ideas that have been explored separately in many communities. But to this day no one has built a true Progress City — which means we have no real idea how transformative it might be to see all these ideas deployed simultaneously. Mall or no mall, perhaps it’s time we tried. http://ideas.ted.com/the-strange-sur...shopping-mall/ |
Some Turkeys, a Dead Cat, and a Lot of Turkey Experts
What's going on here? By Eric Grundhauser MARCH 02, 2017 https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...b2bf4d84e2.png Nature is full of mystery, but none are as compelling at this very moment than why these turkeys are circling a dead cat. As seen in a recently released video that has been spreading across the internet like overflowing gravy on a Thanksgiving plate, a group of turkeys was caught on tape walking in a nearly perfect circle around a deceased cat in the middle of the street. The person filming the strange behavior, which he tweeted, seems to be baffled by the birds’ conga line, but experts quoted across the internet seem to blame it on one thing: turkeys are kind of dumb. An expert Gizmodo spoke with, posited that the birds were just curiously checking out a potential threat, and got locked in a hypnotic cycle of one bird following the tail of the one in front of it, unto infinity. Other turkey specialists, including ones quoted in The Verge, seem to have come to similar conclusions, saying they’d seen similar behavior in the turkeys before. Among the other publications to have spoken with turkey experts today: Boston Magazine, the Huffington Post, and the Boston Globe. Today was a big day for turkey experts. Some Turkeys, a Dead Cat, and a Lot of Turkey Experts | Atlas Obscura |
DARPA researchers detail restoring active memory program - Business Insider
WASHINGTON, DC — There's hope for bringing back long-forgotten memories if research from the government's top scientists is successful. Scientists with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are building brain implants that may offer the key to restoring memories for the millions of Americans who have sustained a traumatic brain injury or suffer from memory loss. "We're opening the door to the possibility," said Dr. Justin Sanchez, the director of the agency's biological technologies office. "We're trying to understand what does it mean to interface with the nervous system? Do we have the technologies to understand what the brain is telling us?" As it turns out, we do. At DARPA's annual "Demo Day" at the Pentagon, Sanchez detailed some of the work his office had achieved in just a couple of years, specifically with its Restoring Active Memory program, or RAM. "We can identify the signatures of the brain that tell us when you're going to make a good memory recall or when you're going to stumble on your memory recall," Sanchez said. "And we can actually deliver direct stimulation to the brain in order to facilitate memory formation and recall." Put simply, initial findings from RAM tests on human subjects show that scientists can capture and understand signals from your brain, and they've learned that a little electrical jolt can sometimes help with memory formation. "If you had a traumatic brain injury and lost the ability to form and recall memories, if you had a medical device that could help you with that it can be transformative." Still, DARPA has plenty to learn. The agency is a long way off from a science fiction-like implant for healthy humans to have knowledge inserted into their brain — think "The Matrix" — or a world in which humans use just their thoughts to control things in the home. Though these wild ideas are certainly possible within our lifetimes, as Sanchez has said in the past. But right now, the agency is working out the "fundamentals" — seeing if human subjects can work with simple memories like facts or lists of words. "It's a really interesting future ahead of us," he said. |
When I think back to what "modern medicine" was like when my grandparents were my age in the 60's... and my parents were my age in the 80's... and what we have now... and what we will have when I'm 80... a line from one of my favorite nerd movies of the 80's sums up what I think we may be in store for... "Doctor game me a pill, I grew a new kidney!"
All you have to do is watch Jason Bourne and understand that the genetic stuff in that movie isn't crazy future space technology. The kind of shizzle that happens in secret labs around the world is already way beyond just making people strong and smart. I want to take a pill that grows me gills like in Waterworld... might be "hard" now, but give it a couple decades and you'll be able to get those pills in vending machines. |
This Mutant Crayfish Clones Itself, and It’s Taking Over Europe
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018...-master768.jpg Carl Zimmer Frank Lyko, a biologist at the German Cancer Research Center, studies the six-inch-long marbled crayfish. Finding specimens is easy: Dr. Lyko can buy the crayfish at pet stores in Germany, or he can head with colleagues to a nearby lake. Wait till dark, switch on head lamps, and wander into the shallows. The marbled crayfish will emerge from hiding and begin swarming around your ankles. “It’s extremely impressive,” said Dr. Lyko. “Three of us once caught 150 animals within one hour, just with our hands.” Over the past five years, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues have sequenced the genomes of marbled crayfish. In a study published on Monday, the researchers demonstrate that the marble crayfish, while common, is one of the most remarkable species known to science. Before about 25 years ago, the species simply did not exist. A single drastic mutation in a single crayfish produced the marbled crayfish in an instant. The mutation made it possible for the creature to clone itself, and now it has spread across much of Europe and gained a toehold on other continents. In Madagascar, where it arrived about 2007, it now numbers in the millions and threatens native crayfish. “We may never have caught the genome of a species so soon after it became a species,” said Zen Faulkes, a biologist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, who was not involved in the new study. The marbled crayfish became popular among German aquarium hobbyists in the late 1990s. The earliest report of the creature comes from a hobbyist who told Dr. Lyko he bought what were described to him as “Texas crayfish” in 1995. The hobbyist — whom Dr. Lyko declined to identify — was struck by the large size of the crayfish and its enormous batches of eggs. A single marbled crayfish can produce hundreds of eggs at a time. Soon the hobbyist was giving away the crayfish to his friends. And not long afterwards so-called marmorkrebs were showing up in pet stores in Germany and beyond. As marmorkrebs became more popular, owners grew increasingly puzzled. The crayfish seemed to be laying eggs without mating. The progeny were all female, and each one grew up ready to reproduce. In 2003, scientists confirmed that the marbled crayfish were indeed making clones of themselves. They sequenced small bits of DNA from the animals, which bore a striking similarity to a group of crayfish species called Procambarus, native to North America and Central America. Ten years later, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues set out to determine the entire genome of the marbled crayfish. By then, it was no longer just an aquarium oddity. For nearly two decades, marbled crayfish have been multiplying like Tribbles on the legendary “Star Trek” episode. “People would start out with a single animal, and a year later they would have a couple hundred,” said Dr. Lyko. Many owners apparently drove to nearby lakes and dumped their marmorkrebs. And it turned out that the marbled crayfish didn’t need to be pampered to thrive. Marmorkrebs established growing populations in the wild, sometimes walking hundreds of yards to reach new lakes and streams. Feral populations started turning up in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia and Ukraine in Europe, and later in Japan and Madagascar. Sequencing the genome of this animal was not easy: No one had sequenced the genome of a crayfish. In fact, no one had ever sequenced any close relative of crayfish. Dr. Lyko and his colleagues struggled for years to piece together fragments of DNA into a single map of its genome. Once they succeeded, they sequenced the genomes of 15 other specimens, including marbled crayfish living in German lakes and those belonging to other species. The rich genetic detail gave the scientists a much clearer look at the freakish origins of the marbled crayfish. It apparently evolved from a species known as the slough crayfish, Procambarus fallax, which lives only in the tributaries of the Satilla River in Florida and Georgia. The scientists concluded that the new species got its start when two slough crayfish mated. One of them had a mutation in a sex cell — whether it was an egg or sperm, the scientists can’t tell. Normal sex cells contain a single copy of each chromosome. But the mutant crayfish sex cell had two. Somehow the two sex cells fused and produced a female crayfish embryo with three copies of each chromosome instead of the normal two. Somehow, too, the new crayfish didn’t suffer any deformities as a result of all that extra DNA. It grew and thrived. But instead of reproducing sexually, the first marbled crayfish was able to induce her own eggs to start dividing into embryos. The offspring, all females, inherited identical copies of her three sets of chromosomes. They were clones. Now that their chromosomes were mismatched with those of slough crayfish, they could no longer produce viable offspring. Male slough crayfish will readily mate with the marbled crayfish, but they never father any of the offspring. In December, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues officially declared the marbled crayfish to be a species of its own, which they named Procambarus virginalis. The scientists can’t say for sure where the species began. There are no wild populations of marble crayfish in the United States, so it’s conceivable that the new species arose in a German aquarium. All the marbled crayfish Dr. Lyko’s team studied were almost genetically identical to one another. Yet that single genome has allowed the clones to thrive in all manner of habitats — from abandoned coal fields in Germany to rice paddies in Madagascar.In their new study, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, the researchers show that the marbled crayfish has spread across Madagascar at an astonishing pace, across an area the size of Indiana in about a decade. Thanks to the young age of the species, marbled crayfish could shed light on one of the big mysteries about the animal kingdom: why so many animals have sex. Only about 1 in 10,000 species comprise cloning females. Many studies suggest that sex-free species are rare because they don’t last long. In one such study, Abraham E. Tucker of Southern Arkansas University and his colleagues studied 11 asexual species of water fleas, a tiny kind of invertebrate. Their DNA indicates that the species only evolved about 1,250 years ago. There are a lot of clear advantages to being a clone. Marbled crayfish produce nothing but fertile offspring, allowing their populations to explode. “Asexuality is a fantastic short-term strategy,” said Dr. Tucker. In the long term, however, there are benefits to sex. Sexually reproducing animals may be better at fighting off diseases, for example. If a pathogen evolves a way to attack one clone, its strategy will succeed on every clone. Sexually reproducing species mix their genes together into new combinations, increasing their odds of developing a defense. The marbled crayfish offers scientists a chance to watch this drama play out practically from the beginning. In its first couple decades, it’s doing extremely well. But sooner or later, the marbled crayfish’s fortunes may well turn. “Maybe they just survive for 100,000 years,” Dr. Lyko speculated. “That would be a long time for me personally, but in evolution it would just be a blip on the radar.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/s...es-europe.html |
Sounds like we need some of those in the lakes and streams around here... the crayfish populations in Maryland are way lower than they used to be (based purely on personal experience) |
Originally Posted by airbrush1
(Post 1465883)
Sounds like we need some of those in the lakes and streams around here... the crayfish populations in Maryland are way lower than they used to be (based purely on personal experience) |
If they taste good then bring 'em down to Alabama. I just had a big plate of mud bugs a couple weeks ago, delicious.
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About 25 years ago, I got a limited tour of the Providence - sister ship to the Dallas from Red October. My friend's brother was a junior officer on board, and the XO okayed a walk-around while they were in Groton for a refitting. Still being in duty, everything was impressively maintained. "Those over there are torpedoes, the others next to them are Harpoon anti-ship missiles, and the ones in the stainless cigar cases are Tomahawk cruise missiles. Behind us, we have a vertical launch ability - the only Los Angeles class boat with it. I can neither confirm nor deny that we carry nuclear arms." Besides gaining a greater respect for the submariners, I was struck by the actual machine. It's a bad-ass silent killing machine in the front and the back, with a nuclear power plant just forward of the rear torpedo room, with everything else being a large custom-fitted computer and JUST enough room around the systems for the crew. The Navy isn't playing for 2nd place. |
When “Blowing Smoke Up Your Ass” Was Much More Than Just A Saying
Discover the shockingly literal and thoroughly disturbing 17th-century medical origins of the idiom "blowing smoke up your ass." https://allthatsinteresting.com/word.../two-smoke.jpg “Oh, you’re just blowing smoke up my ass,” is something you might hear someone say when they think you’re just telling them what they want to hear. But in 18th-century England, blowing smoke up one’s ass was an actual medical procedure, and no, we aren’t kidding. According to Gizmodo, one of the earliest reports of such a practice took place in England in 1746, when a woman was left unconscious after nearly drowning. Her husband allegedly took the suggestion of administering a tobacco enema to revive her, a practice that was rising in popularity at the time as a possible answer to the frequent, local instances of drowning. Left with little choice, the man took a tobacco-filled pipe, inserted the stem into his wife’s rectum, and, well, blew a bunch of smoke up there. As strange as it may sound today, it reportedly worked, the hot embers of the tobacco leaf jolting the wife back into consciousness, and the practice grew quickly from there. But where did the idea to use tobacco as a form of medicine come from? Indigenous Americans, who used the plant to treat various ailments, invented what we refer to as the tobacco enema. English Botanist, physician, and astrologer Nicholas Culpeper borrowed from these practices to treat pain in his native England with methods including enemas to treat inflammation as a result of colic or a hernia. https://allthatsinteresting.com/word...ke-drawing.jpg Years later, English physician Richard Mead would be among the earliest proponents of using the herbal enema as a recognized practice, and helped bring its use, however short-lived, into mainstream culture. By the late 1700s, the blowing smoke had become a regularly applied medical procedure, mostly used to revive people thought to be nearly deceased, usually drowning victims. The process was so common, in fact, that several major waterways kept the instrument, consisting of a bellows and flexible tube, nearby in case of such emergencies. The tobacco smoke was believed to increase the heart rate of the victim and encourage respiratory functions, as well as “dry out” the insides of the waterlogged individual, making this method of delivery more preferred than breathing air directly into the lungs via the mouth. https://allthatsinteresting.com/word...ema-device.jpg Textbook drawing of a tobacco smoke enema device. 1776. Before the implementation of an official instrument, tobacco enemas were typically administered with a standard smoking pipe. This proved to be an impractical solution as the stem of a pipe was much shorter than the tube of the instrument that would come later, making both the spread of diseases such as cholera, and the accidental inhalation of the contents of the patient’s ---- cavity, an unfortunate yet common possibility. With the tobacco enema’s rise in popularity in full swing, London doctors William Hawes and Thomas Cogan together formed The Institution For Affording Immediate Relief To Persons Apparently Dead From Drowning in 1774. The group was later named the much simpler Royal Humane Society, a charitable organization that “grants awards for acts of bravery in the saving of human life and, also, for the restoration of life by resuscitation.” It is still in operation today and is now sponsored by the Queen of England. https://allthatsinteresting.com/word...an-profile.jpg Thomas Cogan The practice of awarding life-saving citizens has been a hallmark of the society since its inception. Back then, anyone known to revive a drowning victim was awarded four guineas, equal to around $160 today. Blowing smoke, of course, is no longer in use today. However, the tobacco enema had a good run during the 18th century, and its usage even spread to treat additional ailments such as typhoid, headache, and stomach cramping. But with the 1811 discovery that tobacco is actually toxic to the cardiac system, however, the popularity of the practice dwindled quickly from there. https://allthatsinteresting.com/blowing-smoke |
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The Physics Of Why Timekeeping First Failed In The Americas
The world’s greatest clockmaker sent a clock to the new world, and everything went haywire. https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...0f1bae03bb.png For millennia, humanity’s one-and-only reliable way to keep time was based on the Sun. Over the course of a year, the Sun, at any location on Earth, would follow a predictable pattern and path through the sky. Sundials, no more sophisticated than a vertical stick hammered into the ground, were the best timekeeping devices available to our ancestors. https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...29dc513e1d.png For countless millennia, sundials were the most accurate way of keeping time. Despite the repetitious nature of orbits, there is an inherent uncertainty, at any given moment, of approximately 15 minutes in what a sundial records. All of that began to change in the 17th century. Galileo, among others, noted that a pendulum would swing with the same exact period regardless of the amplitude of the swing or the magnitude of the weight at the bottom. Only the length of the pendulum mattered. Within mere decades, pendulums with a period of exactly one second were introduced. For the first time, time could be accurately kept here on Earth, with no reliance on the Sun, the stars, or any other sign from the Universe. https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...5488a1be2c.png One of the very first clocks ever produced by Christiaan Huygens, which operated on the principles of a fixed-period pendulum. The clock still survives today, and can be found in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The most renowned clockmakers of the 17th century were Dutch, led by the great physicist Christiaan Huygens. Huygens made tremendous advances in the science of wave mechanics, optics, physics (discovering centripetal force), and astronomy (including investigating Saturn’s rings and discovering its giant moon, Titan). In 1656, however, he made his greatest contribution as a scientist and inventor: the pendulum clock. https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...1a1179bc8d.png The schematic design of the second pendulum clock built by Christiaan Huygens, published in 1673. Huygens wasn’t the first to recognize that the gravitational acceleration at Earth’s surface, known today as g, was constant, but he was the first to put it to such tremendously good use. By applying that phenomenon to the problem of an oscillating pendulum, he was able to derive an extremely useful mathematical formula for the period of a pendulum: T = 2π √(L/g),where T is the pendulum’s period, L is the length of the pendulum, and g is the gravitational acceleration at Earth’s surface. For this derivation, there are many historians who classify Huygens as the first modern theoretical physicist. https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...48b9fa1428.png A pendulum will swing with a specific period dependent not on its mass, the amplitude of its swing, or a host of other factors. Only the length of the pendulum and the value of the location gravitational field determine the pendulum’s rate of oscillation. But this was the beginning of Huygens’ work on pendulum clocks. He realized that, so long as you kept your pendulum powered so that it would continuously tick away with the same, small amplitude to its swings, you could keep time indefinitely. He then went a step further, and not only built his own clocks, but published a design by which anyone could do it. Within just a few years, clockmakers in the Netherlands and England were able to keep the time, accurately, to within a few seconds over the span of a full day. For nearly 300 years, until the early 20th century, the pendulum clock remained the most accurate timekeeping standard accessible to humanity. https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...3c0eaa246d.png A new standard in the world’s most accurate timing device was set by this ‘atomic clock’ invented in 1955 at Columbia University by Professor Charles H. Townes (left) with the assistance of Dr. J.P. Gordon (right). Atomic clocks were temporarily surpassed by pulsars, but have regained the crown as the most accurate way humans keep time in the Universe. The American continents, however, then known as the New World, had no such clockmakers available. It wouldn’t be until 100 years after Huygens that the first American-made pendulum clock was constructed. The way, then, to keep time more accurately than a sundial would be to take one of the world’s best, Dutch-made clocks, and bring them, via ship, to the New World. Any motion would disturb the period of a pendulum, so accurate timekeeping — at that time — was only possible in a stationary location. The clock would be constructed and calibrated in the Netherlands, shipped overseas, and then restarted at its destination. Compared to a sundial, whose accuracy was limited to about ±15 minutes a day, the pendulum clock should have reduced those errors to merely a few seconds. As soon as the clock arrived and was set up, it began keeping time more accurately than any timepiece before ever located on the North American continent. At least, that was what everyone assumed was happening for about a week or so. But after that amount of time, it became clear that something was amiss. The Sun and Moon weren’t rising at their predicted times, but rather were off by a bit. Even worse, the amount that the clock was off by appeared to be getting worse over time: whatever error was at play was accumulating. Instead of these reliable, celestial events occurring at the predicted times on the clock, they were occurring earlier, according to the clock. Something was wrong. The clock was not only running slow, but appeared to be losing close to a minute per day. https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...fc9aa3f732.png The balance spring system, developed by Christiaan Huygens, is one of the many components that went into a well-engineered pendulum clock. When the clock was returned to the location of its manufacture, it kept time perfectly once again, allowing people to determine that it wasn’t a flaw with the clock, but rather gravitational variations, that caused the clock to keep inaccurate time in the New World. This was completely unacceptable! Timekeeping, by the end of the 17th century, was accurate to within 2-to-4 seconds per day. Why would that be happening? The only assumption that the colonists of the New World could figure out — since there were no clockmakers (or clock-repair experts) present — was that the timepiece must have somehow been damaged during the journey. So what can you do in that situation? The same thing you do today: send it back to the manufacturer for repairs. So this enormous, heavy, complicated clock was shipped all the way back to Europe, where the Dutch clockmakers examined it for defects. When they restarted the clock back in the Netherlands, they received the biggest shock of all: the clock worked exactly as designed, keeping time as precisely as any other similar timepiece: to within just a few seconds per day. Although this experience will sound familiar to anyone who’s noticed funny behavior in their car, took it to the mechanic, only to have the problem disappear when it arrived, there was a reasonable explanation for what happened here. In fact, no one’s observations or measurements were wrong, nor were there any mechanical problems. The only thing that was different, that nobody realized at the time, was that the acceleration due to gravity at Earth’s surface, g, isn’t the same everywhere on Earth. https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...28c2af94ad.png The layers of Earth’s interior are well-defined and understood thanks to seismology and other geophysical observations. The gravitational acceleration is determined by the masses beneath your feet and your distance to the Earth’s center, meaning there are gravitational variations due to latitude, altitude, and the composition of Earth’s interior from place to place. Our Earth isn’t a perfect, uniform sphere, but a rotating layer-cake. The atmosphere sits atop the surface, which has a complex and unique topography that rises miles and miles above sea level in many locations, and dips down miles beneath sea level in the deepest trenches. There’s an enormous, massive ocean atop the crust, which floats atop the mantle, which itself envelops the outer and inner core. As the Earth rotates, it bulges at the equator and compresses at the poles. When you take all of these factors into account, you’ll learn that the value of gyou learned in physics class — 9.81 m/s2 — is only the average value of g at planet Earth’s surface. If you went all over the world, you’d find that g actually varies by about ±0.2% in either direction: from 9.79 to 9.83 m/s2. The difference in g is most pronounced with latitude: equatorial (smaller) latitudes have lower values of g and polar (higher) latitudes have larger values. Because of the latitude differences between the Netherlands and the location where the clock resided in the New World, g was different (smaller) by about 0.01 m/s2 in the Americas. This is what caused the clock, operating with a period given by T = 2π √(L/g), to lose about 45 seconds per day. The solution? You have to make sure that the ratio, (L/g), stays constant. If gis 0.1% smaller in a new location, shorten the length of your pendulum (L) by 0.1%, and you’ll keep time properly again. If g is larger, lengthen your pendulum accordingly. Only with the proper period can a pendulum clock keep the time as it was designed. https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...7f3b19e76a.png A clock that has a pendulum of a specific length will keep time accurately so long as the precise gravitational field of Earth is at the correct value for the pendulum’s calibration. If moved to a location with a different local value for gravity, a different length for the pendulum will be required. The reason your pendulum clock keeps track of time so well is because each swing of a pendulum takes the same amount of time to complete. The only two factors that determine the swing time, under ideal conditions, are the length of the pendulum and the gravitational acceleration at Earth’s surface. Even though the Earth is very close to a perfect sphere, and even though the acceleration due to gravity is almost constant everywhere, these tiny differences can add up. We had no idea that the Earth’s gravitational acceleration varied in the 17th century, and it’s arguable that we found out in the most unceremonious way. Yet even an unintentional experiment can be groundbreaking and educational, as bringing a Dutch-made pendulum clock to the New World proved to be. At the end of the day, whenever you learn something new about the Universe, it has to be considered a victory. https://medium.com/starts-with-a-ban...s-63e180029e1f |
It's amazing to me how much effort the human race has put in to accurately measuring time, yet we still use the Babylonian sexagesimal system they derived based on willfully cludged astronomical observations. They knew there weren't 360 days in a year. But here we are, thousands of years later, worshipping the relationship between Mesopotamian sun and moon Gods in ignorant bliss.
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It's annoying, but it mostly works.
Of course, for purely political reasons, I'll be at work at 2am tomorrow morning to make sure that technology properly conforms to our twisted notion of what was best for farmers in the 19th century. I wonder if anyone had every sat down and calculated the actual cost of having tens of thousands of engineers sitting at their terminals at 2am on a Sunday, twice every year, hoping that absolutely nothing interesting happens. It's even weirder at a TV network headend in the midwest. 2am happens three times for us. Once on the east coast feed, then an hour later locally, and then two hours later on the Pacific feed. This year, I made an executive decision and said (paraphrasing): "Fuck it. We're just going to let the time be wrong for one hour on the east feed and for two hours on the west feed. A minor discrep in the Nielsen logs at 2am on a Sunday when viewership is damn near zero isn't worth the hassle." |
"annoying & not worth the hassle" can usually be spun to leadership as "cost saving opportunity"
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Originally Posted by Joe Perez
(Post 1509445)
It's annoying, but it mostly works.
Of course, for purely political reasons, I'll be at work at 2am tomorrow morning to make sure that technology properly conforms to our twisted notion of what was best for farmers in the 19th century. I wonder if anyone had every sat down and calculated the actual cost of having tens of thousands of engineers sitting at their terminals at 2am on a Sunday, twice every year, hoping that absolutely nothing interesting happens. It's even weirder at a TV network headend in the midwest. 2am happens three times for us. Once on the east coast feed, then an hour later locally, and then two hours later on the Pacific feed. This year, I made an executive decision and said (paraphrasing): "Fuck it. We're just going to let the time be wrong for one hour on the east feed and for two hours on the west feed. A minor discrep in the Nielsen logs at 2am on a Sunday when viewership is damn near zero isn't worth the hassle." |
Originally Posted by wackbards
(Post 1509434)
It's amazing to me how much effort the human race has put in to accurately measuring time
How Do Some Clocks Set Themselves? From the article: "The new clock will neither gain nor lose a second over 3.7 billion years, the researchers report, giving it the title of the world’s most precise clock". I wonder how they'll know? |
I'm currently wearing a watch out of a Chinese factory. the movement is an automatic Seagull ST25 variant. The design dates to about 2003 but intertwines with the history of the Chinese watchmaking industry dating back to the mid 1950s. The Tianjin Watch Factory (now Seagull) was the first maker of 100% Chinese watches. They almost stopped making mechanical watches but decided against that and have continued making and improving the designs over the years.
It was quite inexpensive, as automatic watches go, but it's pretty neat to wear. https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...029a25284c.png Here is the back. I did a quick slow motion so you could see the balance wheel doing its thing. Normally it's oscillating 6 times a second (21,600 bph). and here is an interesting read for Joe: History of Chinese watchmaking - Chinese Watch Wiki |
Originally Posted by bahurd
(Post 1509631)
All this and the clock that sits on my dresser still updates itself twice each year 1 week early (fall) and 1 week late (spring). Chinese programming?
Amusingly, these clocks will all stop working when WWV / WWVB are shut down, which is scheduled to happen next year. |
I had a Chinese watch from an official state propaganda store. It had a picture of Mao Zedong on it, and the arms pointed at the time. I called it a Mickey Mao watch. It told terrible time.
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For decades, Garfield telephones kept washing ashore in France. Now the mystery has been solved.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/resiz...CBLPVXCN6Q.jpg A plastic Garfield phone sits on the beach in Plouarzel, western France, after being collected by environmental activists, on Thursday. (Fred Tanneau/AFP)By Meagan FlynnMarch 29 at 7:16 AMFor more than 30 years, pieces of Garfield telephones kept washing ashore on the beaches of northwestern France, and no one quite knew why. Where was the lasagna-loving cartoon cat coming from? The mystery would puzzle the locals for years. His plastic body parts, first appearing in a crevice of the Brittany coast in the mid-1980s, kept returning no matter how many times beach cleaners recovered them. Sometimes they would find only his lazy bulging eyes, or just his smug face, or his entire fat-cat body, always splayed out in the sand in a very Garfield fashion. From the stray curly wires and the occasional dial pad, it was clear that the pieces came from the once-popular Garfield telephone, which hit the shelves in the early 1980s, several years after Jim Davis first colored the famously lazy cat into his hit comic strip. The phone parts were in remarkable condition, considering they had been belched from the ocean, Claire Simonin-Le Meur, president of the environmental group Ar Viltansoù, told The Washington Post. Even Garfield’s black stripes were still painted onto his back, where the phone hooked. She had been searching for the origin of Garfield for years, she said, out of concern for the damage the plastic phones may be doing to the ocean — and this month, after a chance encounter on the beach, she was about to get answers. Simonin-Le Meur said the common belief among locals was that the phones came from a wayward shipping container that must have sunk to the bottom of the ocean, leaving environmentalists to fear Garfield’s plastic toxicity would continue to pollute the ocean indefinitely. In 2018 alone, at least 200 pieces of Garfield had been found on beaches in northwestern France, FranceInfo reported. If they could just salvage the long lost shipping container, Simonin-Le Meur said, perhaps Garfield would stop coming. “We were looking for it, but we had no precise idea of where it could be,” Simonin-Le Meur said. “We thought it was under the sea. We asked people who were divers to look for it. We get a lot of submarines in the area too — it’s a military area. But they said it was not possible the container could be there and nobody saw it.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/resiz...NXD3S3Y2TI.jpg Pieces of the Garfield telephone discovered by Ar Viltansou. (Courtesy of Claire Simonin-Le Meur) This year, however, something changed. Simonin-Le Meur got a tip. It came from a local farmer named René Morvan. All of FranceInfo’s recent publicity of the bizarre phenomenon and its environmental impact had apparently sparked his memory. One day last month, Simonin-Le Meur said she met Morvan on the beach while cleaning up debris — including a Garfield part. “Are you looking for Garfield?” the man asked. Simonin-Le Meur said yes, she was — she always was. “Come with me,” the man told her. “I can show you.” Morvan started from the beginning. Back when he was 19 or 20 years old in the mid-1980s, he told her, a storm blew through the area — and before residents knew it, Garfield telephones were scattered all over the beach, just as Simonin-Le Meur had always been told. He and his brother were curious, Morvan said, and they decided to go exploring, touring the rocky coastline until they found what they were seeking. Wedged inside a cave, tucked into the seaside cliffs, there it was: a metal shipping container — and a cache of Garfield telephones, Morvan claimed he saw. The story struck Simonin-Le Meur as too good to be true. The tide was too high to bring her to the cave that day, Morvan realized, and so she would have to wait to find out if he was telling the truth. The shipping container, Morvan told her, was lodged so deep in the cave that it was nearly submerged, making the trip a dangerous expedition. But finally, last week, it was safe. The tide was low. And Morvan, Simonin-Le Meur said, ultimately was not kidding. Filming the discovery, a group of journalists and environmentalists, Simonin-Le Meur included, climbed up the rocky shore to the cave’s narrow opening, finding snippets of a bright orange phone cord along the way. Garfield was scattered all about, just like on the beach. But when the group entered the cave, ready for the big reveal, they didn’t find what they expected. It was clear the plastic cats had been there, Simonin-Le Meur said, but clearer still that most were already gone. “Our preoccupation was to understand why we had so many Garfields everywhere. We thought it would be helpful to find the container so we can stop it. But that was unfortunately not the case,” Simonin-Le Meur said. “What we found was the remainder of the shipping container. And it was empty.” It seemed the group had solved the mystery, she said, but not the problem. The “Téléphone Garfield,” as it is known in an online catalogue for ubiquitous ocean debris, is just one plastic item among myriad others that litter the ocean and the shore every year. In the region of northwestern France, the Garfield phone has become like an unwitting Smokey Bear, the mascot for the importance of ocean cleanup and the dangers of microplastics polluting the ocean. Lionel Lucas, who developed the online Ocean Plastic Tracker that catalogues discoveries of Garfield, told FranceInfo the Garfield phone was a “symbol” for the movement. “It is no longer garbage but evidence,” Lucas said. Simonin-Le Meur said that she has tried to use Garfield particularly as a way to interest children in ocean pollution, given its allure compared to other pieces of plastic trash. And while the recent purported discovery of Garfield’s origins has drawn renewed interest, Simonin-Le Meur said, the discovery didn’t change much in her eyes. “We found plastic last Friday and Saturday and Sunday, and we have found a lot of pieces of Garfield,” she said. “Things are just exactly the same.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...as-been-solved |
How dumping tons (literally) of plastic into a reservoir helped to improve the quality of the water supply in LA:
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I'm thinking that most people are too stupid to understand the bromide/bromate part, so they just let it leak that they are for evaporation.
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James Cameron used those floating balls to fill a pool to film the Abyss simulating the lack of light in deep ocean.
This thread is full of awesome. The submarine photos are a great find, thanks for sharing. |
The Nordic Food Lab, which is part of the The Department of Food Science at The University of Copenhagen, has published a paper which, among other things, describes how you can substitute blood in place of eggs in baked goods, ice cream, etc., just in case you happen to be out of eggs but find yourself with a surplus of blood.
Blood and eggJanuary 7, 2014by Elisabeth Paul OVERVIEW Animal blood has a long culinary history throughout Europe, though recently has become neglected. We are interested in (re)valorising the despised and forgotten, so we had to look deeper into what blood is, how it should be handled, and what to use it for. Its coagulating properties led us to focus on blood as an egg-substitute in sweet products, since egg intolerance is one of the major food allergies affecting children in Europe. In fact, eggs and blood show similar protein compositions, particularly with the albumin that gives both their coagulant properties. Based on these similarities, a substitution ratio of 65g of blood for one egg (approx. 58g), or 43g of blood for one egg white (approx. 33g) can be used in the kitchen. Using this method, we have developed recipes for sourdough-blood pancakes, blood ice cream, blood meringues, and ‘chocolate’ blood sponge cake. A further benefit of blood is its ability to prevent anaemia – the most common micronutrient deficiency worldwide – due to the high bioavailability of its haeme-iron. This iron, of course, is often the challenging factor for taste, which in many cultures have traditionally alleviated by pairing with it strong flavours such as herbs and spices. We investigated some of these traditional pairings as well as some newer ones including woodruff and roasted koji. During sensory evaluation, we were surprised at the variation in perception of the bloody aftertaste, which led us to an interesting discussion on the relationships between gender, age, and taste. Blood for most is not a go-to ingredient. It has become somehow ‘edgy’, almost forbidden; yet it has been used as food for as long as animals have been killed and eaten. It is elemental, both mystical and mundane. And it makes us damn curious in the kitchen. Blood is a brute fact of killing animals. A slaughtered pig can yield between 2.25 and 4.5 kg of the stuff,[1] which adds up quickly. We are always searching for deliciousness in the ignored and overlooked, so the question arose: how can we transmute this substance into an ingredient fit to celebrate? And then, more specifically: could blood be a substitute for eggs, especially in pastry, given that egg white intolerance is Europe’s second largest food allergy?[2] Even just decades ago, blood was appreciated as a source of nutriment and unique taste – appearing in an indescribable variety of blood puddings, blood sausages, blood desserts and blood pancakes throughout the Europe and Asia. Why is the tradition of cooking with blood disappearing from our kitchen? One answer might be the disappearing knowledge on how to process it – and with this disappearing knowledge comes insecurity for those who are trying to preserve and rediscover it. Where does it all go? By far most blood from pigs (around 70%)[3] is separated into plasma and serum used in animal feed, pharmaceutics, cosmetics, and commercial products like cigarette filters. Dried blood is used as fish food or fertilizer. Red blood cells are used for mink feed. Meat glue, or transglutaminase, is used to make novel forms of meat, like imitation crab, or to bind cuts in hams[4] – and in fact is an enzyme extracted from blood, originally responsible for clotting by stabilizing the protein fibrin.[5] Composition Though the bloods of different mammal species are similar in composition, the amount of blood obtained per animal varies greatly. In pigs, for example, blood makes up around 3.3% of live weight, which generally yields about 2.5L per animal. Blood is a homogenous mixture of blood cells and serum. The serum (55%) is mainly composed of water (80%) and proteins (17%) such as albumin, fibrinogen and globulin, as well as glucose, minerals and hormones.[6] Serum albumin is the most abundant and important protein in the serum, at around 50% of total protein content. This places it at a similar level to ovalbumin in eggs, around 60% of total protein content – which means in the kitchen, it provides an optimal replacement due to its foaming ability.[5] There are three types of blood cells suspended in the serum: white blood cells; platelets or thrombocytes; and red blood cells which contain most of the haemoglobin, a iron-bound protein that is responsible for the red colour. Colour changes depend on reactions of these iron ions, regulated by storage conditions, oxygen availability, and temperature, and are similar to the colour changes that happen with meat. Vacuum-packed, blood is dark, close to purple; left outside for a while or whipped into foam, it turns bright red; and heat treatment leading to protein denaturation gives it a dark-chocolate brown, nearly black appearance. Blood Clotting Once the animal is slaughtered, blood platelets and plasma come into contact with other animal tissue, causing blood clotting. Due to the enzyme thrombin, the fibrinogen in the serum is transformed into fibrin, an insoluble protein forming strands. In these strands, big red blood cells get predominantly trapped, giving the intense dark colour from the haemoglobin contained therein.[5] There are several anticoagulants that can be added to prevent this process. Generally calcium ion binding salts such as citrates and phosphates are used in slaughterhouses to prevent clotting. Traditionally, a metal spoon would be used, with constant stirring. If calcium ions are bound, no available calcium means no clotting. Important: shake blood regularly before use, and strain. Blood as substitution for eggs One great argument for blood as an egg-substitute is the increasing food allergy for egg proteins, nowadays second-most prevalent food allergy in Europe, affecting mainly children but also adults. In Germany, for example, 8% of children have temporary reactions to egg. Other sources estimate that 30-53% of children with food allergies in European countries like Spain and France are allergic to ovalbumin.[2] Blood shows a similar protein composition to egg, yet with slightly different types of proteins. The serum albumin, as the main constituent of blood protein with 55%[4] is tolerated whereas ovalbumin in egg white leads to heavy allergic reactions. But perhaps the greatest argument for cooking more with blood is to alleviate iron deficiency, which causes anaemia -– the world’s most common micronutrient deficiency.[7] And the haeme-iron in blood, in turns out, is the best possible source for the human body, showing a 2- to 7-fold bioavailabilty in comparison to non-haeme iron.[8] Cooking properties of blood The texture in blood pastries in comparison to egg-pastries is intriguingly similar. When whipping blood, more time and stepwise increase in speed is required, similar to methods for producing a very stable, fine-beaten egg white. Coagulation due to heat treatment occurs between 63°C - 75°C. Heat denaturation of serum albumin requires a temperature of 75°C – at this temperature batters with blood will thicken. Egg coagulation, due to ovalbumin on the other hand, does not happen until 84.5°C. So less heat and hence less time is required when cooking with blood. General substitution ratios: 1 egg (approx. 58 g/unit) = 65 g of blood 1 egg white (approx. 33 g/unit) = 43 g of blood We have also observed interesting leavening properties in baking sourdough bread when sourdough starter is fed with blood instead of water for its final feeding. Volume nearly doubled in less than 1 hour, turning the bread dough dark-chocolate brown and changing the flavour profile of the bread to a richer, mildly acidic, moist bread. This discovery is still preliminary, and more culinary research is needed on blood and sourdough. Hiding the animal – masking aromatic agents Eugenol and cinnamaldehyde are classic aromatic compounds that are found in traditional recipes in combination with blood. In tasting panels done with blood meringues (recipe below) cinnamon and clove expectedly scored low in bloody aftertaste, but new combinations involving roasted barley koji and woodruff also showed promise. Another good combination appears to be blood and acid, as tried in the sourdough blood pancake recipe. One possible reason could be due to the similarity of stimuli for acidic and metallic receptors on the tongue, both being sensed through ion channels, but we have found no research on this subject. Due to sometimes intense and unexpected responses from taste testers, the question arose whether metallic taste and/or animal notes would be perceived differently according to gender and age. We discovered that taste perception in general differs between male and female tasters, and younger and more elderly, with women generally having an increased sensitivity towards metallic taste.[9] Perception thresholds for bitter and sweet compounds vary not only between the sexes, but also with monthly-changing hormone concentrations in women that influence their nervous system.[10] Decreasing thresholds during menstruation means that women will perceive bitter compounds more easily at these times. Unfortunately no research has been done on changes in metallic taste-perception during the menstrual cycle, since metallic taste via ion-channels is a rather young discovery. During our own tests of our blood pastry products, however, this difference became obvious to us. Animal aromas exhibit similar properties. Olfactory stimuli are translated in the central nervous system, and stimulation can be altered with changing hormone concentrations.[8] Women are thus generally more sensitive to androstenone and skatole (two animalic odours occurring in entire male pigs) than men, and might therefore show lower preference for blood containing products from entire pigs.[11] This may be the case even though skatole and androstenone are ten times more concentrated in the fat than other tissues or blood. More research needs to be conducted on the subject.[12] RECIPES Using blood in the kitchen drove us to the edge: blood with sourdough, blood as sourdough feed, blood in kefir-culture (not recommendable), blood in alcohol creating the Red Russian (in vodka, after filtering the denatured fibrin clots – only sipped once). |
(Continued due to post length limitation)
Here are some recipes that can be and have been eaten with a clear conscience. Blood ice cream (for 1 paco container – 12 servings) This recipe is inspired by traditional Italian dessert variations called sanguinaccio.[13]Given that cocoa doesn’t grow here in the north, we have run our trials with roasted barley koji, which is a brilliant alternative and ingredient in its own right – especially in combination with blood, giving body, bittersweet complexity and increasing the malty notes of the moulded, toasted grain taste. 300 ml pig blood (318 g) 60 g roasted Koji 300 g milk 3.5% fat (it may need around 200 ml extra, depending on the fineness and absorption capacities of the grain) 200 g cream (38% fat) 88 g trimoline (or 11% of ice cream mixture) 2.8 g guar gum (or 0.3% of rest of ice cream mixture including trimoline) The day before: Grind roasted koji to fine powder and cold-infuse it into 300 ml of milk. Leave at 4°C for 24h. Production day: Pass cold infusion through a super bag and measure yield. Add more whole milk to reach weight of 300 g. Strain pig blood to remove coagulated protein clumps. Add cream, blood and trimoline to mixture and start to heat over water bath while stirring constantly. Once temperature reaches 50°C, add guar gum and continue stirring until mixture thickens to chocolate brown custard. Heat until 75°C and hold at temperature for 15 seconds. Fill pacojet container and freeze. Once frozen, spin in pacojet and serve. Sourdough blood pancakes Swedish blodplättar and Finnish veriohukainen are traditional variations of blood pancakes, and provided an existing foundation to understand platelets’ culinary functionality. In fact, the name blodplättar itself translates directly as ‘platelets’. The acidity of the sourdough starter is a great aid to soften the metallic aftertaste of the blood. Basic recipe for fluffy pancakes. 235 ml of rye sourdough starter 150 ml of pig blood 30 g of melted butter 50 g of granulated sugar Strain pig blood to remove blood clots. Add sugar to blood and whisk in Kmix/Kitchenaid. Increase speed gradually until mixture is stiff. Mix sourdough starter with melted butter, fold in 1/3 of blood foam, and add the rest once it becomes a homogenous batter. Bake in pan in abundant butter until dark chocolate colour. Caution: easy to burn due to similar colour range of batter and burned pancake. Blood Meringue Blood as egg substitute in meringue seems difficult texture-wise at first, but once the whipped blood and sugar form this magnificent foam, all doubts are cleared. Probably one of the strangest textures Nordic Food Lab has seen, and one of the most beautiful. Definitely room for further investigations. We also want to note that this one was inspired by the pig's blood macaron from Trials have been done with both the French and Italian meringue methods (Harold McGee divides them into uncooked and cooked)[14]. Preferable for blood seems to be the uncooked method, since the meringues are perceived as less animal in flavour to the tasting panel. [font]70 g pig blood[/font] 30 g of granulated sugar 30 g of icing sugar Flavour variations used: [font]2 pinches of Long pepper and salt, ground[/font] or 2 pinches of cinnamon, ground or 3 pinches of woodruff, dried and ground Pour blood and granulated sugar into a kmix/kitchenaid and start mixing at low speed. Gradually increase speed up to level 5-6 once sugar is dissolved. Add icing sugar to the whipping blood, and make sure nothing sticks to the wall. Season blood mixture when it is glossy, bright red, and very stiff. Fill in piping bag, place meringue on baking mats and dry at 93°C at very low ventilation level (level 2 on Combi Rationale oven) until dry and dark chocolate brown. Sponge Cake – Basic recipe without egg How to bake a classic black forest cake without egg – an adaptation of the Larousse recipe. [font]230 g pig blood[/font] 100 g granulated sugar 25 g wheat flour 25 g corn starch 25 g cocoa or roasted koji, ground (Koji recipe see blogpost je) Sieve flour, starch and koji twice to obtain a homogenous mixture. Mix blood very slowly in Kmix/Kitchenaid gradually adding sugar. Once dissolved increase speed to level 6-7 and whip until stiff. Pour in flour-mixture and lower speed to minimum, incorporating flour into blood mixture without volume loss. Fill in spring form and bake at 180°C for 25 minutes. Test the cake by touching the surface – when it makes a crackling sound the cake is ready. If you make two, you can use them as the base for a classic black forest cake. Or in this case, a not-so-classic blood forest cake. As with all the other recipes, taste testing was of utmost importance. I made two half-cakes: one with blood, the other a chocolate control. Both were delicious. It may seem excessive, but I'm German and cake-making is in my blood. Best Practices when handling blood 1. Best source is your butcher of confidence. Ask him where the blood is from, when the pig was killed and how the blood was treated (with anticoagulants) 2. Smell it! It should have a sweet, rich, metallic odour without strong animal flavours. Strong aromatic changes can occur in un-castrated pigs due to their production of skatole and androstenone. 3. Respect cold chain throughout the handling (2 – 4 degrees) and use within a week when refrigerated. 4. Shake and strain before use. 5. Freeze for longer storage. The colour becomes darker. Thaw blood on the same day as processing. The approximately 8 L of pig blood that have been used during the experimentation came from 3 free-range pigs, raised and slaughtered at Grambogård Slagteri, a slaughterhouse with high animal welfare standards in Funen, Denmark. Blood and egg ? Nordic Food Lab |
I'll stick with black puddings, which are sausages made with oats, suet and blood.
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Time to tickle Joe's pickle:
inputs to an oscope that play music that animates the scope. as seen on: |
Cool
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Full article here-
http://imbibemagazine.com/Old-Tom-Gin/ Follow the Black Cat If the first question people ask about Old Tom is "What is it?," the second is usually about how it got its peculiar name. Again, there's no simple answer. As with many lost liquors, the history behind Old Tom is a patchwork of partial facts, incomplete information, and the kind of yarns that provoke cocked eyebrows. Most of the tales involve a black cat--the tom in question. Hayman's reports that back in 1736, one Captain Dudley Bradstreet lucked into both a piece of London property and a stock of gin. Bradstreet hung a sign depicting a painted cat in the window and let it be known that doses of sweet mother's ruin could be had at the address. "Under the cat's paw sign was a slot and a lead pipe, which was attached to a funnel inside the house," reads a history put together by Hayman's. "Customers placed their money in the slot and duly received their gin. Bradstreet's idea was soon copied all over London. People would stand outside houses, call 'puss' and when the voice within said 'mew,' they would know that they could buy bootleg gin inside. Very soon Old Tom became an affectionate nickname for gin." |
I found this bit of lawyer-eez entertaining. (emphasis by me).
Whenever any complaint is made, as provided for in W.S. 37-2-118, that the heat units of the natural gas supplied by any utility to the users thereof in any town or municipality are below the standard thereof theretofore used as a factor in the basis for rates to be charged by the utility in that particular town or municipality, the public service commission shall notify the state chemist to make proper tests of the heating units of the gas furnished by such utility to the complaining municipality. |
Today, I became aware of the fact that "State Chemist" is an official job title.
https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=h...jpg&f=1&nofb=1 |
And the rest of the section says that the chemist's time is to be charged to the Wisconsin University System.
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Google claims breakthrough in quantum computing. Completed computation that would take the fastest super computer 10,000 years in under 4 minutes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/t...62tion=topNews SAN FRANCISCO — Google said on Wednesday that it had achieved a long-sought breakthrough called “quantum supremacy,” which could allow new kinds of computers to do calculations at speeds that are inconceivable with today’s technology. In a paper published in the science journal Nature, Google said its research lab in Santa Barbara, Calif., had reached a milestone that scientists had been working toward since the 1980s: Its quantum computer performed a task that isn’t possible with current technology. In this case, a mathematical calculation that the largest supercomputers could not complete in under 10,000 years was done in 3 minutes 20 seconds, Google said in its paper. Scientists likened Google’s announcement to the Wright brothers’ first plane flight in 1903 — proof that something is really possible even though it may be years before it can fulfill its potential. “The original Wright flyer was not a useful airplane,” said Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin who reviewed Google’s paper before publication. “But it was designed to prove a point. And it proved the point.” A quantum machine, the result of more than a century’s worth of research into a type of physics called quantum mechanics, operates in a completely different manner from regular computers. It relies on the mind-bending ways some objects act at the subatomic level or when exposed to extreme cold, like the metal chilled to nearly 460 degrees below zero inside Google’s machine. One day, researchers believe, these devices could power advances in artificial intelligence or easily overwhelm the encryption that protects computers vital to national security. Because of that, the governments of the United States and China consider quantum computing a national security priority. But first, scientists must prove such a machine can be built, and some researchers cautioned against getting too excited about Google’s milestone since so much more work needs to be done before quantum computers can migrate out of the research lab. Right now, a single quantum machine costs millions of dollars to build. Many of the tech industry’s biggest names, including Microsoft, Intel and IBM as well as Google, are jockeying for a position in quantum computing. And venture capitalists have invested more than $450 million into start-ups exploring the technology, according to a recent study. China is spending $400 million on a national quantum lab and has filled almost twice as many quantum patents as the United States in recent years. The Trump administration followed suit this year with its own National Quantum Initiative, promising to spend $1.2 billion on quantum research, including computers. Traditional computers perform calculations by processing “bits” of information, with each bit holding either a 1 or a 0. That has been the case for decades. Understanding how a quantum computer is different requires a philosophical leap: accepting the notion that a single object can behave like two separate objects at the same time when it is either extremely small or extremely cold. By harnessing that odd behavior, scientists can instead build a quantum bit, or qubit, which stores a combination of 1 and 0. Two qubits can hold four values at once. And as the number of qubits grows, a quantum computer becomes exponentially more powerful, making today’s supercomputers look like toys. Scientists first described the idea in the 1980s, but qubits are fragile. Stringing even a few together can involve years of work. For the past several decades, labs in academia, industry and government have worked on quantum computing through a wide variety of techniques, including systems built around particles of light or electromagnetic fields that trap tiny charged particles. About 20 years ago, researchers in Japan pioneered “superconducting qubits,” for which certain metals are chilled to extremely low temperatures. This method has shown particular promise, sparking projects at IBM, Google and Intel. Their machines look nothing like a regular computer. They are large cylinders of metal and twisted wires that are dropped into stainless steel refrigerators. You send information to the machine, as you would to a traditional computer chip, and receive calculations in return. Google’s paper became a bit of an internet mystery after it was published and then quickly unpublished online in late September. That brief appearance was enough to raise the hackles of researchers at competing companies who believe the Silicon Valley giant is inflating its accomplishment. On Monday, IBM fired a pre-emptive shot with a blog post disputing Google’s claim that its quantum calculation could not be performed by a traditional computer. The calculation, IBM argued, could theoretically be run on a current computer in less than two and a half days — not 10,000 years. “This is not about final and absolute dominance over classical computers,” said Dario Gil, who heads the IBM research lab in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where the company is building its own quantum computers. Other researchers dismissed the milestone because the calculation was notably esoteric. It generated random numbers using a quantum experiment that can’t necessarily be applied to other things. Though IBM disputed that Google had really accomplished all that much, Dr. Gil argued that quantum computers were indeed getting closer to reality. “By 2020, we will be able to use them for commercial and scientific advantage,” he said. Like much of the cutting-edge work being done in corporate research labs, Google’s quantum effort has its roots in academia. In 2014, Google hired a team of physicists who had spent the previous several years working on quantum computing at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The researchers were expected to discuss their work with reporters later on Wednesday. As its paper was published, Google responded to IBM’s claims that its quantum calculation could be performed on a classical computer. “We’ve already peeled away from classical computers, onto a totally different trajectory,” a Google spokesman said in a statement. “We welcome proposals to advance simulation techniques, though it’s crucial to test them on an actual supercomputer, as we have.” The calculation performed by Google’s machine is a way of showing that a complex quantum system can be reliable. The company also believes the random numbers it generates could have practical uses. As the machines get better over time, they could help improve cryptography, or even aid in the creation of new medicines or materials, said Daniel Lidar, a professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in quantum computing. “This would be a big deal,” he said. “It has applications in many different places.” Dr. Lidar said he expected that other scientists would try to disprove Google’s claims. But some see a broader benefit to all researchers working on this near-mythical device. “Google’s result is a major achievement not just for Google but also for the broader scientific community,” said Chad Rigetti, who worked on IBM’s quantum computing project and now runs his own start-up. (Mr. Rigetti’s wife is an editor for the Opinion section of The New York Times.) “It is just a short amount of time now before we have commercially relevant problems that quantum machines can solve,” he said. |
Maybe they should use all that computing power to mine for Bitcoins. Might help pay for further R&D.
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I read in another article, that this "problem" was also basically a designed specifically for Google's computer to solve quickly. Basically making the 200 seconds part worthless.
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Let's cut the crap and get to the important stuff.
Will this lead to true virtual reality? On a more serious note this is quite extraordinary and I'm surprised it isn't making more waves. If we ever create an AI system this will be it's "brain". |
Originally Posted by 90LowNSlo
(Post 1553038)
Will this lead to true virtual reality?
On an unrelated note, I find the following article fascinating, as someone who grew up with a kitchen of harvest-gold and avocado-green, plus curtains with corn cobs printed on them. The narrative which it tells seems to closely mirror the recent history of automotive design, insomuch as bold styling and bright colors became fashionable in the 1950s and 60s, then gave way to cars painted brown and gold and orange in the 1970s, and eventually we wound up in the present. Here's a challenge: how many cars do you see on the road every day which are not painted some variant of white / grey / black? By the same measure, modern kitchen appliances are styled in a way which is vastly different from their mid-century predecessors, but have returned to a color palette which is entirely lacking in chroma. The Hidden Forces Behind the Rise and Fall of Colorful Kitchens in Postwar Americahttps://timedotcom.files.wordpress.c...-smart-set.jpg The bright postwar landscape, with its color-conditioned schools, its two-tone Chevys, and its orange-roofed Howard Johnson’s restaurants, whetted the appetite for more color in the home. Howard Ketcham’s work on the Bell Model 500, a direct response to this taste, was paralleled by the appliance industry’s move toward color. In the 1920s, Macy’s Color in the Kitchen promotion had popularized pots and pans in bright hues, and Kohler Color Ware had made some headway in the bathroom. But the colorization of big-ticket durable goods for the home had been stymied by the Depression and by World War II. In 1949, the Chambers Company, a small Indiana stove factory, startled everyone by offering stoves in red, black, blue, gray, yellow, and green. Rumors circulated that the colorful models accounted for one-third of the Chambers Company’s sales. When a major trade association for the paint industry reported the rising popularity of kitchens in canary yellow and chartreuse, the household equipment industry took notice. “Let’s face it,” said a 1951 report on women and electrical appliances compiled for the Ralph H. Jones Advertising Agency by Ernest Dichter’s Institute for Motivational Research. “The General Electric refrigerators, Kelvinator, and Frigidaire are not . . . different from one another,” making it hard to “capture the consumer’s heart by assaulting it . . . with a barrage of publicity.” The postwar appliance customer had most likely worked in an office, a store, or a factory during the war, and knew her own mind. Unlike her “old-homebody” mother, she decorated to express “her creativity and individuality.” She wanted “electrical appliances not only for their utilitarian value but for their contribution to her kitchen’s livability,” and she expected “the style of the refrigerator or washing machine ‘to harmonize with the rest of the kitchen’s décor.’” https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.c...800&quality=85 The manufacturers’ challenge was to turn a utilitarian product into a fashion accessory. Dichter, who had probed the minds of consumers for hundreds of companies, recommended a “psychological strategy.” Color, he suggested, was a psychological tool that could reach deep into the mind and unlock the consumer’s nascent or unrealized desires. The largest market for color appliances was to be found in new suburban developments such as the three Levittowns (one on Long Island, one in Pennsylvania, and one in New Jersey). Developers knew that the frazzled house hunter, exhausted after an endless Sunday afternoon of open houses, would remember “the one with the red and white kitchen.” But the populations of these new communities were less stable than the builders would have liked, and the rapid turnover affected how houses were designed. “Today,” according to a report from a conference on color in interior decoration sponsored by the builders’ magazine House & Home in 1955, “most people buy their homes ready made, just as they buy their clothes ready made or their cars ready made. Today only one house out of six is built for a known buyer, and even that one house in six will probably be re-sold to an unknown buyer within five years.” Color selection, always a risky business, was complicated by the anticipation of mobility. Bankers and appraisers had to deem a house suitable to be resold before they would lend money to the builder or the homeowner. The “streamlined” kitchen — one with modernistic cabinets, chrome-trimmed counters, and color appliances — was still too unusual for cautious money men. “The builder can take his profit and run once he has found a buyer who likes the colors he has chosen, but the mortgage lender must live with the house for 20 or 30 years through many changes of ownership. He has the biggest stake in the use of safe colors, for he has the most to lose by a color choice that might lower the re-sale marketability of the house.” The Federal Housing Authority, which oversaw mortgage lending to veterans under the GI Bill of Rights, took a conservative stance. The editor of House & Home explained the realities to an appliance executive: “FHA now tends to give a lower valuation where color is used. This is for two reasons: 1. FHA is afraid color may reduce marketability, because the color that suits one woman may not suit the rest. 2. FHA has no accepted color standards that its appraisers can use as a yardstick.” The Housing Act of 1954 provided federal loans for remodeling and encouraged lenders to approve streamlined kitchens if remodelers wanted them. But a builder of new homes still couldn’t “use colors his mortgage lender will not finance.” In the end, the worries of bureaucrats, bankers, and appraisers limited the dissemination of colored appliances. https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.c...800&quality=85 As consumers in urban neighborhoods and in older suburbs looked to modernize older homes, manufacturers of electric appliances saw sales opportunities. “One big reason the appliance makers are eager to sell color into the kitchen is their hope that colored kitchens in new houses will also start a big replacement demand as old houses follow the new house lead. That’s why General Electric is so pleased that 80% of its new house major appliance sales are in color.” GE hoped that the Piotrowskis, the Celluccis, the Goldblums, and the O’Neills would want to keep up with the Joneses, but identifying a market segment was not the same as realizing sales. How should manufacturers approach the replacement market? Should they target the consumer’s unrealized desires, or should they cater to her actual needs? Most appliance executives took a pragmatic approach to these decades-old marketing questions, which had been codified in the 1920s. One salesman who supplied vitreous enamels to appliance makers knew Ernest Dichter’s psychological theories and was skeptical. Granting that the “consensus of the motivational research boys is that colors and built-in appliances are the only things that meet the emotional needs of the modern woman,” he expressed belief that the American manufacturing system could satisfy customers without bowing to fashion. Through “economics and mass production,” appliance makers could deliver affordable prices and a modicum of style. The purchasing agent for Levitt & Sons also skirted around the popular psychobabble and the idea of style obsolescence: “The idea of the colored kitchen is to attract the consumer to spending more money for her kitchen — money that would otherwise be spent for a television set or automobile — something new. It is eye-catching, appealing and she wants it.” Market researchers at McCall’s, a popular magazine for middle-class suburban housewives, documented the rising interest in colorful appliances. By early 1955, the average homemaker had seen color appliances in magazines, stores, and showrooms, at open houses in new suburban developments, and in the homes of friends and relatives. Some women still preferred white appliances: “I love a change in decorating, especially in the kitchen where I spend so much time. I would hesitate to buy colored appliances for this reason. I pick neutral colors for counter tops and floors also, so I can change to any new color.” But more than half of the women in the McCall’s survey said they would buy a new appliance in color, even if it were more expensive. “I love color! I spend most of my time when home in my kitchen and like a pretty yellow kitchen. My appliances are white and no matter how I plan my color scheme, my range, refrigerator, [and] broiler stick out like ‘sore thumbs.’ If they were in pastel colors, they would blend.” The trend toward thinking of the kitchen as a living space encouraged the new outlook. As more blue-collar families moved to suburbs, they took the idea of the all-purpose kitchen with them. In urban apartments, the large kitchen had served as a community gathering space, much as in a farmhouse. This vernacular tradition of adaptive use fit with Frank Lloyd Wright’s modernist concept of the open floor plan, with the kitchen opening into a dining-living room. Suburban builders adjusted their designs for Cape Cod cottages and split-level ranches to accommodate “nostalgic feelings for the days when the kitchen was the family living room” and “people ate near the stove and shared stories.” If the kitchen was a space for living, then it should be decorated as such, complete with colorful accents. Do-it-yourself paints allowed consumers to satisfy this impulse on a budget. Sunshine Yellow appliances required a more substantial investment and signified a greater commitment. As public opinion was gravitating toward color in kitchen decoration, a different obstacle to color appliances appeared: three out of four appliance dealers took “a dim view of the whole idea.” The retailers worried about higher prices, the difficulty of matching shades, and inventory management — many of the same worries that car dealers had about two-tone paint jobs. “The biggest headache will be having not only the right model but the right model in the right color and . . . the right shade. What about matching chipped stove panels? What prices will we have to pay for parts due to excessive inventory . . . in our distributors’ warehouses?” Stores that stocked different brands were especially concerned about mismatches: “There’s Sky Blue, Baby Blue, French Blue, Cadet Blue. . . .” The “color idea” was a big headache — lots of work and no guarantees. |
(continuing, due to character-limit)
A God-Sent OpportunityAt Frigidaire, it’s pastel. . . .Westinghouse terms it frosting. But top men agree: “A little color brightens a whole line’s sales.”—Sales Management, 1956 In 1954, Frigidaire (the Dayton-based appliance division of General Motors) became the first manufacturer of kitchen equipment to offer a “full line” of color appliances. This meant that, like GM cars, Frigidaire color appliances came in several price brackets — Standard, Master, De Luxe, and Imperial — and were designed in Detroit by Harley Earl’s styling section. At Frigidaire, color did fit into a broader plan for style obsolescence — but not in the way Vance Packard described. In advising dealers to exploit color, Frigidaire headquarters explained how colored appliances fit into GM’s “ladder of consumption” strategy. The goal was not, as Packard wrote, to treat appliances like millinery, convincing “Americans they should replace refrigerators, ranges, and washing machines every year or so.” It was to encourage consumers to replace their older white appliances with the new colorized models bit by bit over the years, until the ensemble was complete. Frigidaire’s well-developed national distribution network encouraged franchisees to push color. One dealer put the burden on the store managers — “the first essential to selling Frigidaire appliances in color is to have the guts to buy . . . color” — but regional tastes played a role. Consumers in warmer climates and in more recently developed regions of the country (the Southwest, the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Coast) liked color; those in the industrial Northeast, the Midwest, and the Southeast did not. Down-market stores shied away from color appliances, which had higher sticker prices than white ones. But in a middle-class or upper-middle-class market that could bear higher prices, a Frigidaire dealer could pocket 20% more from a color order. The co-owner of an appliance store in Salinas, Calif., spotted a “God-sent opportunity” that would allow his store to compete with a neighboring Montgomery Ward store. “We felt that our big competitors couldn’t get into colored appliances quickly enough because their buying procedures and merchandising techniques are not as flexible as the smaller dealer,” Paul Kane told a trade journal. “We decided to get so well established as ‘color headquarters’ that it would be difficult for these stores to overtake us.” The “crusade for color” gave the partners the chance to apply their “selling ability,” chatting up style and beauty to an “army of do-it-yourselfers who’ve been redecorating and have just got to the kitchen.” They also sold customers on the idea that tinted appliances would have higher value at trade-in time. In Texas, the Good Housekeeping Shop in Odessa had success with Frigidaire colors. The Good Housekeeping Shop, opened in the autumn of 1957, was the brainchild of an entrepreneurial appliance salesman familiar with the Houston and Odessa markets. Refusing to stock any brand of appliances other than Frigidaire, the Odessa store and a Midland branch “sold color aggressively.” Operating on the principle that “you can sell white over color but you can’t sell color over white,” the owner kept “complete displays of all colors in both stores.” Ensembles of matching appliances — a refrigerator, a range, a washer, and a dryer — were displayed in color groups, creating a rainbow effect that attracted customers into the showroom and held their attention. Salesmen were trained to “sell kitchen beauty and kitchen decoration as well as to sell the product.” One explained: “It is our habit to sell the item first, and then ask the customer which color will fit their color scheme the best, ‘What color do you want to buy?’” Three out of four shoppers who bought color returned within six months to purchase another major appliance. In 1958, nearly half of the shop’s orders were for color appliances. Despite these successes, appliance dealers still saw white as “a safe bet” and worried about their ability to stock matching appliances down the road. In 1959, the Home Appliance Company in Texarkana, Texas, complained about the lack of colorized stock available in the Standard and De Luxe price ranges. In 1955 and 1956, the store had displayed color models and consumers had responded positively, particularly to mid-price ($300–$400) refrigerators. Forty-nine percent of the refrigerators and 37% of the ranges sold that year were colorized. But since then, the dealer had had trouble getting colorized models in low and middle price ranges from the distributor, much to the chagrin of customers. “In the appliance business, we do not sell a complete kitchen every time.” When a customer who had bought a Standard refrigerator returned for a matching stove, she found that her only option, if she wanted to match the color, was a top-of-the-line Imperial priced at nearly $450. As a result, sales of colored appliances had fallen by nearly 10%. “I don’t think it is right to start a customer with color . . . when she could not complete the color due to the high price.” In appliances, as in autos, the color revolution encountered unforeseen contingencies. Production hurdles, inadequate inventories, marketing challenges, and public perceptions made it tough for even the most sophisticated companies to convince consumers to embrace the concept of the color ensemble. Even as consumers warmed up to color appliances, the production and distribution system was ill-equipped to cope. Regional tastes, lingering biases, and socio-economic differences all contributed to the weakening of sales. In the meantime, cultural critics skewered the manufacturers. “The stylists’ fascination with pastels exhausted itself before the 1950s ended, and the trend went right back to white,” Vance Packard wrote. “Left in the backwash of the change were several hundred thousand home-owners who had believed pastel to be the wave of the future.” The trend did not entirely revert back to white as Packard had predicted. Frigidaire statistics for 1964 showed that color appliances constituted 28.5% of national sales. Yet consumers declined to rush out and replace their Sunshine Yellow refrigerator with a new model in a new fashion color such as Avocado Green. Frigidaire designers may have wanted to engineer style obsolescence, but that wasn’t in the cards. The color explosion of the postwar years was evidence of the extravagances of a growth economy and the maturation of American consumer society. In his focus on the big picture, Vance Packard had offered incisive observations about that consumer culture. But in his critique of design, he had simplified the complexity and overlooked the many cultural and technical contingencies that had led the Bell System, General Motors, and Frigidaire down the color road. Colorists tried to read the popular mood, which was always changing. The best practitioners knew that taste was difficult to pin down and that a shade became passé as soon as it became popular. Obsolescence was part and parcel of the fashion system, which in the course of the twentieth century had migrated from clothing to cars to kitchens. New technologies such as Lucite had introduced better performance and better looks, which the cultural critics read as planned obsolescence. Ultimately the color outburst of the 1950s was contained by an updated version of the simplification project advanced by efficiency advocates such as Herbert Hoover and Margaret Hayden Rorke. A new generation of art directors cut back on the palette in the interest of controlling costs. By the last quarter of the 20th century, more Americans than ever before had dishwashers, phones, and cars, but they were available in fewer colors. https://time.com/5713476/colorful-ki...aint-industry/ |
I must have led an evil life in the 70’s. Karma gave me 2 houses in a row with avocado and dark oak kitchens.
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I am one of those weird people that love pastel kitchens, wood panneling, and then the earthtone browns, greens and oranges from the 1970s.
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Originally Posted by x_25
(Post 1553996)
I am one of those weird people that love pastel kitchens, wood panneling, and then the earthtone browns, greens and oranges from the 1970s.
I find that stuff absolutely abhorrent. |
Originally Posted by z31maniac
(Post 1553999)
Born in the 60s/70s I assume?
I find that stuff absolutely abhorrent. |
Better than the piss yellow offwhite that was popular for a long time.
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Originally Posted by whitrzac
(Post 1554296)
Better than the piss yellow offwhite that was popular for a long time.
But I feel X_25. I really loved the kitchen at my great aunt's house in Indian Hill, an upscale northern suburb of Cincinnati. It was obviously designed by a Frank Lloyd Wright fanboy. Bright and open and airy, as is common today but virtually unheard of in the 1940s. And also colorful, bordering on Googie. The countertops were a sparkly green laminate with brushed-aluminum edging. The cabinets were white, but with an interesting abstract design in the door faces. Chromed pendant lamps hung from the ceiling. And, of course, the appliances were pink. It was groovy. It was, interestingly, also the total opposite of the kitchen at grampa Beadle's place about 80 miles east in the former coal & steel town of Chillicothe. That kitchen was a fully enclosed square room with one window. Dark wallpaper, bright white appliances. I was probably five or six years old the last time I was there, but I still remember how mundane and dull it felt. |
Volkswagen Originalteil
The German auto maker’s “part no. 199 398 500 A” is a pack of sausages.https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...05fc976511.png Wurst news ever: Volkswagen sells more sausages than Beetles, and in 2015 and 2017, it sold more sausages than cars overall. (This should come as no surprise, since sausages have both a lower overhead cost and a lower purchase price than the average car.) But the remarkable popularity of the Volkswagen Originalteil (German for “original part”) has landed the auto maker a space in the tubular meats hall of fame. In 1973, the company started making the currywurst sausages, known as “item no. 199 398 500 A” in the Volkswagen factory, at the company headquarters in Wolfsburg. Meant as a breakfast or lunch item in the company’s cafeteria, the sausages were served whole or chopped up and tossed with Volkswagen’s own factory-made curry-flavored ketchup. These days, 30 kitchen staffers, most of them trained butchers, are put solely on weiner duty, making 18,000 sausages every day. The pork is sourced from local farms, and the recipe, which includes curry powder, pepper, and ginger, is a company secret. The sausages come in two lengths, and are dried, smoked over beechwood, and then steamed at 350°F for 100 minutes. The finished product is shipped in packs of five to VW dealerships all over the country, who then gift it to customers after a successful sale. In 2017, Volkswagen sold nearly 7 million sausages, more than the number of VW-brand cars sold worldwide that year. While the iconic Beetle flits in and out of existence (VW has stopped or threatened to stop production several times in the bug’s life), the Originalteil, which the company recognizes as its “most popular non-vehicle part,” curries on. https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/v...lteil-sausages (Presumably, we will soon learn of a scandal in which VW deliberately mis-stated the fat and sodium content of the sausages in order to comply with EU nutritional standards.) |
I just stumbled across this time-capsule condo listing. It would be a shame for someone to change it.
https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...1883132#photo9 |
I'm having a hard time telling the inside from the outside.
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There is carpet in the bathroom.
W T F? |
Originally Posted by whitrzac
(Post 1563056)
There is carpet in the bathroom.
W T F? Hell, carpet on the toilet seat used to be a thing. Google it. I am not making this up. The 70s were weird. And smelled like piss, to a certain degree. It was a different time. One full of beer & soda cans upon which the tab lifted off rather than being pressed inwards, and in which 100% of new cars were pure shit in one way or another. On the bright side, we did have Aerosmith and Journey, and we knew who The Enemy was. Fuck, now I'm getting all nostalgic... |
We still have Aerosmith, Journey, and The Enemy.
For everything else, there's Amazon. |
I found out today that Mazda used vamp clamps to attach the wires to the outside mirror motors.
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...bf5142fb_b.jpg |
Eat Like You’re in the USSR With ‘The Soviet Diet Cookbook’By making pizza approved by the Communist Party.BY DALIA WOLFSONJULY 20, 2020 https://assets.atlasobscura.com/medi...%20pizza_1.jpg The 1939 cookbook of Soviet cuisine, The Book About Delicious and Healthy Food, opens with a Stalinesque slogan: “Towards abundance!” Earlier that decade, famines had devastated the Soviet countryside, and the memory of food shortages was not far off. But these realities appeared nowhere in the Communist Party-issued cookbook. Instead, it served up a utopian future. The Book was intended to both feed and propagandize. After the 1917 revolution, which ended the Russian Empire and established the Soviet Union, the most well-known cookbook around was still decidedly un-Bolshevik: The Imperial Russian manual by Elena Molokhovets, A Gift to Young Housewives (1861), was replete with elaborate European dishes and household advice on aristocratic concerns such as servants and salons. But Soviet industrialization and ideology couldn’t stomach this bourgeois classic. In the 1930s, the Soviet Party developed a “rational” cuisine promoting what scholar Jukka Gronow calls “plebeian luxury.” Prepared by culinary experts from the Institute of Nutrition of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and published by the USSR Ministry of Food in 1939, The Book delivered a pragmatic and proletarian alternative. Several editions followed, and the expanded, glossy 1952 edition turned the cookbook into a bestseller. Since then, millions of copies have been sold. Nearly 80 years after The Book’s first release, millennial Muscovite Anna Kharzeeva (along with her grandmother Elena*) put The Book’s culinary vision to the test. Kharzeeva’s new cookbook, , chronicles her skeptical but warm-hearted journey through the 400-page Socialist Realist behemoth. From 2014 to 2019, she tried 80 of its recipes, from a flurry of porridges to the pickle-brine soup solyanka. https://assets.atlasobscura.com/arti...6585/image.jpg Amid the Soviet Union’s lean years, the images in The Book About Delicious and Healthy Food suggested the possibility of socialist plenty. Working through The Book, Kharzeeva points out internal inconsistencies. Despite a stated rejection of external, religious, or bourgeois influence, its recipes include versions of the Russian take on Easter hot cross buns (kulichi), the French-inspired Sharlotka apple cake, and a “historical recipes” section featuring foreign favorites with neutralized Russian names. While the ingredient lists in The Book assume plentiful products, Kharzeeva writes that many were available only as special-occasion rations (like caviar) or were rarely accessible (like melons). She also describes a category of rare ingredients used in the book, which include pineapples and real crab meat, as a “Soviet dream.” The cookbook contains no prep times, but Kharzeeva demonstrates that many recipes, such as the five-layer pastry puff kulebyaka, fell far short of liberating Soviet women from kitchen labor. Grandmother Elena’s comments, meanwhile, reveal how Russians handled the contradictions of the Soviet Union and its promises of abundant, modern food. She shares that post-Revolution kids called a lie a “banana,” because finding a banana in the Soviet Union seemed as improbable as the lies told by Soviet politicians. Decades later, Kharzeeva’s mom still converts the price of clothing into bananas because they were so rare and expensive. Food could also serve as code: One would pass on a samizdat (an illegally published book) by saying “I ate the buckwheat and am now ready to give it to you.” Being “closer to the sausage (kolbasa),” on the other hand, meant you were a Party higher-up. Elena’s adaptations of recipes, meanwhile, illustrate the creative methods of Soviet subjects cooking in communal kitchens (a situation the Book never accounts for). For example, the circular chudo (literally, “wonder”) pot could be used to bake cakes or yeast rolls on top of a kerosene burner (before gas ovens were installed) or on a crowded, shared stove. Ingredients could be cleverly served, like caviar atop cooked egg halves instead of bread slices (to reduce the amount consumed), or repurposed, like orange peels hung on laundry lines to refresh clothes. https://assets.atlasobscura.com/arti...6580/image.jpg Vatrushki are cheese-filled pastries.While the Soviet Diet Cookbook exposes the myths of the USSR, Kharzeeva also observes the politics of food in modern Russia. Despite Putin’s claims of Russian self-sufficiency, Kharzeeva, like Elena before her, faces high prices and scarcity. When making her recipes, a decently priced bell pepper or a piece of good lamb is nowhere to be found in Moscow. Contemporary regional tensions in the Eastern bloc, meanwhile, crawl into the presentation of “national” foods. While reviewing the Book’s borscht, Kharzeeva remembers seeing a menu flyer with both Ukrainian and Russian flags. A Ukrainian restaurant, trying to attract customers in the wake of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea (when popular sentiment trended anti-Ukrainian), designed this awkward, seemingly chummy graphic of the former allies. One of the most interesting and widely relatable dishes in The Book is “Toast with Vegetables” or what Elena calls “Soviet Pizza,” a concoction of dough, sour cream, and stewed vegetables that Kharzeeva judges “odd, but healthy and edible.” Pizza as a dish would have been hard to recreate in the Soviet Union. “Real” pizza became available as a fast food only in the 1970s, and it was fancy and expensive, consumed by many first-time patrons with a fork and knife. Forget Parmesan: Elena remembers that only three types of cheese, all locally made, were available to her in stores. Melted, processed cheese was such a rarity outside of the city that Elena’s friend in the village once mistook the silky stuff for face cream. https://assets.atlasobscura.com/arti...6588/image.jpg A bowl of bozbash, a meat stew popular in the Caucasus (left), and the author and her grandmother, Elena (right).At the end of the day, as Elena says, “the shop is empty, but the fridge is full.” The Soviet Diet Cookbook tells the story of propagandist failures, poorly stocked shelves, and warm, resourceful homemakers, then and now. By Kharzeeva’s own admission, some recipes (deep-fried donuts or cornflake cookies) were a flop. But the Book could also delight with its far-away pictures and tasty, tried-and-true staples. The Book, as Kharzeeva writes, was “a whole world in itself, with its own idiosyncrasies, fairy tales, and flowers,” and The Soviet Diet Cookbook brings those Party illusions, and their inevitable folk adaptations, to the kitchen table.
60 grams bread |
The adventures of lab ED011—“Nobody would be able to duplicate what happened there” One Romanian campus computer lab both pentested the world and eventually helped protect it. ANDRADA FISCUTEAN - 8/27/2018, 8:00 AM https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-conte...a3-800x544.jpg The University Politehnica building that hosts the Automatic Control and Computer Science(ACCS)program. BUCHAREST, Romania—At the edge of Europe, Romania’s University Politehnica of Bucharest has long been the most prestigious engineering school in the region. Here, a terracotta-tiled building looms large over the campus, hosting the faculty of the Automatic Control and Computer Science (ACCS) program. On the ground floor, close to the entrance, is a humble computer lab. The label reads ED011. Back in the early 1990s, after Romania escaped the grip of communism, this room was one of the few places offering an Internet connection free of charge. So every night, when no one was watching, students descended upon the lab to connect to the rest of the world. Eager to learn about life in Western Europe and the US, these students already had the look of their counterparts there—long hair, blue jeans, and Metallica shirts. “Computers gave us the possibility to communicate with people around the world, which was extraordinary,” a former student named Lari tells me today. The ED011 computer lab did more than that, of course. It gave these students total freedom—to not only chat on the early Web but to explore all the odd nooks and crannies of computer science. And if you ask former ED011 students, many of them did just that. They built programs to find dates (and watched as things took off far beyond the computer lab). They found the gnarliest malware on the early Web (and built applications to combat it). Some even tried to flex amateur pentesting skills on some of the biggest organizations online at the time (much to the school administration's chagrin). Within this seemingly nondescript university room, Romania's first truly digital generation was born. And some of today's best technical minds anywhere developed the necessary skills to become industry leaders in everything from app development to security research. https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...ae39167035.png Campus at the University Politehnica. https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...0bc7ec129c.png It may not be much to look at from the outside, but the inside of computer lab ED011 is remarkable. In the beginning there was Lari In the early 1990s, Dean Theodor Danila’s desk seemed constantly in disarray. It would pile up with faxes saying that one of his students had hacked someone’s servers again. Who’s furious now? A neighboring university? Some foreign organization? Maybe a military base? From 1993 through 1996, whenever this happened, the dean knew who to blame: Lari—a thin, long-haired metalhead who spent all his nights in the ED011 computer lab at the University Politehnica of Bucharest. “If I were to do today what I did back in the early 1990s, I would be facing thousands of years in jail,” Lari tells me in Romanian. The hacker lives in Western Europe now, and he’s still hesitant to use his real name when discussing his past due to the high-profile targets he and his fellow former students claim they attempted to hack two and a half decades ago. On paper, it’s hard to determine if the following stories represent tall tales, rosy revisionist history, tech-savvy bravado… or a proper recollection of the truth. But Ars talked to a dozen former students, sysadmins at the university, and professors, all who largely corroborate each others’ stories. Some of these individuals still work in technology in capacities like security research, and their skills are also praised by their current communities. To be safe we also approached the organizations apparently targeted from within ED011, but many of these technology departments have changed several times over within the last 25 years. Most said they couldn’t verify or deny the information for us. Lari remembers first going to ED011 in 1993 as a freshman at the Faculty of Automatic Control. The room was dark at night, only a neon tube flickering. Computers lined the walls, and the center of the lab stayed empty. The most sought after machines were the 286 and 386 IBM PCs running Linux and DOS, often used by senior students for their homework. The lab had about a dozen of those, and the scarcity led to a hierarchy of seniority. The freshmen had one IBM PC to share, the sophomores had two, and the remaining computers had been assigned to senior students. There were also six DEC VT320 terminals with black-and-green screens and time-stained cases, and these were typically less crowded. Freshmen like Lari could get a seat at a DEC if they were quick enough. The terminals were attached to a VAX computer that had 4MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. Generally, students spent hours in the lab browsing the Internet, sending emails, and talking to people. They used the Lynx text browser and, later, AltaVista or Lycos for Web searching. The university was connected to the Internet by two 56kb lines, which were used by up to a hundred students at the same time during rush hours. Download speeds of 1KBps were seen as pretty good, but sometimes students had less than 200bps. Lari remembers his fame as a hacker rose early in his freshman year, starting one night before Christmas in 1993. He was chatting with a girl from Illinois, but he lost the connection. He was also in a hurry, as he had to catch a train to visit his parents. Lari tried repeatedly but couldn’t connect back to the chat. He feared he would soon disappoint the girl. “I didn’t know whether she was still waiting for me or not,” he recalls. “So in that frenzy, I hacked her university’s server to see if she was still active.” The server had a standard vulnerability, Lari tells me. Easy. However, there was an issue: Lari didn’t have the time to delete the logs. “After the winter break when I returned to the university, there was a huge scandal,” he recalls. “And that escalated until it reached the dean.” Lari understood he had made a mistake. But instead of convincing him to give up, the incident made him want to become better. Next time, he’ll definitely delete the logs, he thought. Next, he’ll be a better hacker. “I wanted to see how far hacking could take me.” https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...72b252cbba.png Lari remembers coming to Politehnica late at night, carrying his coffee in a bottle. The legend of Lari Looking back, Lari sees himself as an early version of a bug bounty hunter or pentester; he felt like a white hat rather than a black hat. To start, he says Romania didn’t have legislation banning computer hacking at the time. And beyond that, he believed his ultimate hacking goal served the greater good. Even if he chose to target “organizations that sounded cool, such as NASA or [the U.S. Department of Defense’s] army.mil,” Lari says all he wanted was to show that the Internet of the early '90s was imminently hackable. “If I, some ordinary Joe from god-knows-where could hack them, imagine what espionage agencies could do. They rely on thousands of experts, and it was just a matter of time until they would seize the opportunity,” Lari says. “I wanted to create a proof of concept for a global penetration system.” A 20-something in some tiny university computer lab talking about hacking such big, bleeding-edge tech organization sounds crazy in retrospect. But Lari’s track record seems to vindicate the brashness of his youth. From his monochrome VT terminal, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) sat near the top of his wish list. Located near Geneva, Switzerland, this was the very place where the English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee had created the World Wide Web a few years back in 1989. “I hacked into CERN on multiple occasions,” Lari says plainly. They had Cray supercomputers, graphics workstations, and plenty of servers that captivated the young hacker. His ultimate goal was pretty mundane: Lari wanted to hack the www.cern.ch webpage by adding a “+” character at the end of a line. “Back then, on a text webpage, paragraphs were separated by something that looked like this: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++,” he notes. “I didn’t want to do anything intrusive.” The CERN sysadmins, however, noticed the additional ‘+’ and eventually figured out it was inserted by someone from the University Politehnica of Bucharest. But rather than demanding the dean take Lari to task, “CERN said that it’s great that Politehnica has people interested in security,” he recalls. “[They said] that the university should have a safe environment for testing different attack scenarios.” (Ars talked to several retired CERN staff but none could remember this incident.) As part of his mission to find how hackable the Web was, Lari says he developed an arsenal of tools from scratch. For one tool he recalls fondly, Lari once engineered a computer worm and improved its functionalities over two years. Unlike the better known Morris worm, which spread beyond control and shut down the Internet in 1988, Lari claims his malware was carefully written and went completely unnoticed to this day. It simply tested servers using a database of vulnerabilities Lari created. “Once installed on a server, my worm didn’t do harm. It only spread to other servers, reaching new departments [within the organization] or independent contractors,” he says. As the hacker explains it, the malware worked on several Unix operating systems. When it propagated into a network, it first monitored the network to learn its patterns. The worm then tried to mimic those patterns to avoid detection. “The worm’s code was obfuscated, and it would change after every replication. The database the worm used was encrypted and randomized,” Lari says. When the job was done and a server became irrelevant, the worm would fully erase itself, as Lari tells it. And as the student read the logs, he was shocked to learn that the online world was a Web of weak links and vulnerabilities. But again, Lari’s actions didn’t go unnoticed. His other purported exploits included US institutions like UCLA, where a pwned university IT person eventually became his pen pal. “A professor once told me that the University received a call from the US Embassy in Romania,” he says. “Another one claimed that the scandal escalated, and Romania’s president at that time, Ion Iliescu, found out about me.” (When reached for comment, the US Embassy told me it has little information on this, as the event occurred long ago. It could neither confirm nor deny Lari’s claim. Former President Ion Iliescu, currently on trial for crimes against humanity, no longer gives interviews and, thus, could not be reached. Nor could his wife, the former first lady Nina Iliescu.) Luckily for Lari, whenever things escalated, he had a prominent university professor again and again on his side. “[Students like Lari] only wanted to learn, and they were brilliant,” the professor, who asked to remain anonymous, told Ars. His reason for allowing students like Lari to hack the world? “If you don’t break things, you won’t understand how they are made.” However, this professor couldn’t save Lari forever, and the student’s biggest alleged target would end up being his last: the Pentagon. One day, as Lari tells it, his worm discovered a common vulnerability on one of the Pentagon’s servers. “It intrigued me, and I wanted to find out what kind of hardware they had, how many CPUs, how much RAM.” He remembers managing to get inside by exploiting the vulnerability, but someone soon noticed his presence. “They cut my access in two or three minutes, and the server became invisible to me,” Lari says. He remembers the server could only be accessed from a few selected military bases in the US, and, after this hack, it looked like security experts working for the Army restricted access to it even further. Lari tells me he needed a week to find the server again. (Pentagon spokesman Army Lt. Col. Jamie Davis told Ars he can neither confirm nor deny the student’s claim: “Anybody that was in uniform at that time has long since retired.”) Any mild victory was short-lived, however—the dean heard about this incident, too. Outraged, the dean and the professors decided to ban Lari entirely from using the university’s computers. His time in ED011 had come to an end. And with his pentesting dreams achieved, Lari swore off hacking to boot. It would be up to other long-haired hackers in Metallica shirts to carry on the ED011 reputation. https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...2d1795760b.png "The ED011 students were geniuses,” Ender tells me today. “People like them are not easy to find.” The continuation of ED011 Communist-era apartment buildings tower over an American-looking shopping mall on the outskirts of Bucharest. It’s a blizzardy morning in February 2018, and computer engineer Daniel Mihalcea meets me in a cafe. But back in his ED011 days, this man was known as Ender. He took the nickname after Orson Scott Card’s hero, a gifted but shy kid who trained to save the world. Ender says he built his first virus when he was a sophomore, in 1996, just three years after Lari kickstarted the lab’s reputation. Ender recalls putting a lot of time into making it stealthier and more compact. He tested his baby using two popular bits of malware detection software at that time, F-Prot and ThunderByte Antivirus (TBAV), and he was thrilled to discover that they couldn’t catch it. Much like his fictional counterpart, Ender came to master cyberspace war games. (to be continued...) |
“My virus was also difficult to reverse engineer,” he says. “It encrypted itself, and it was memory-resident [it hid in the RAM, not leaving traces on the hard drive].” Ender says his malware didn’t do anything spectacular in retrospect—it simply rebooted the computer after four minutes and 25 seconds, because his birthday is on April 25. When he became something of an unofficial sysadmin for the lab, he’d even use it to help shyer students get computer time if other students were hogging space for something like playing games. So like his peers, Ender tells me he always acted as a white hat hacker (unlike Lari, though, he did not become a frequent visitor to the dean’s office). Romanian tech-savvy crooks elsewhere may have resorted to stealing money from American and Canadian credit cards to deal with life post-communism, but in ED011, such practices weren’t welcome. “[My malware] was just a proof of concept, and it has never been released in the wild. I only wanted to hone my skills,” he says, looking back on it. “Most students wrote computer viruses to prove to themselves and the others how well they understood the machine… The ED011 students were geniuses. People like them are not easy to find.” Before the collapse of communism within Romania in 1989, dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had previously kept the country’s borders closed, isolating the people and telling them little about what was going on in the democratic world; the regime stifled almost every freedom. Lari, Ender, and these other early ED011 hackers, were part of a generation pushing back against this, the result of a poverty-fueled rebel culture boiling up in the last years of communism and bursting forth into the early 1990s. When outdated factories collapsed and inflation approached 300 percent a year, these students still couldn’t travel abroad, but talking to people from the West made them feel like rebels. https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...4fd084acda.png From L to R: former ED011 students Vampi, Lil Guy, and Ender. The continuation of ED011 “ED011 was our only connection to Western Europe and the US,” Stefanita “Vampi” Vilcu tells me. (He got the nickname in high school, because of his pointy vampire-like canines.) Once, he spent 36 hours in a row in the lab, but he can’t brag about it. Other students would hang out for two or three straight days. In ED011, there was simply always someone you could ask questions or learn from. The hackers were good people, he says. “They had common sense, and it stopped them from causing damage to the systems they gained control over.” Often, students like Ender or Vampi tell me, the most brilliant ED011 students even outsmarted their professors and taught them some advanced Unix or Linux techniques. Such happenings created a dynamic where the teachers didn’t always feel like they were in a position to comment about the students' hacking activities. “It was weird to have that professor come and say: thanks for teaching me things, but maybe you should stop hacking,” Vampi recalls. Another former student, Claudiu “Zombie” Petcut, characterized the work of ED011’s post-Lari hackers as savvy but small in stakes. They only mocked the sysadmins and did small, local hacks, targeting things like the university’s servers. He recalls doing things like fork bombs—commands that kept overloading the servers with processes until they became inoperable. “We were the good guys,” Zombie says. “We only did innocent hacking.” Zombie and a trio of former ED011 students—Radu “Micutzu’” (Lil’ Guy) Petean, Bogdan “Therion” Busuioc, and Daniel “Dave” Matei—even have occasional reunions to this day as a result of one of ED011’s most productive tech endeavors: the telnet-based chat system, Meet. Created by lab regular Bogdan “Phil” Velcea, the program grew out of experiments in ED011. It launched in 1997, soon spread across all of Romania, and eventually found adoption in places like Finland and the US. (Of course, Zombie and his Meet pals now use Facebook groups instead.) “Being social and meeting people was an important part of the late 1990s,” Phil tells me, noting that some of the couples who met online through Meet even got married. “I’ve tried to hook-up with one or two girls on Meet, but I couldn’t,” Phil says. “[Even online,] I was too shy.” So from pranks to products, malware to marriages, the legacy of ED011 lives on for the students it helped shape. “ED011 and other such computer labs are the reason why Romanians are good in technology,” Therion tells me. “We had the curiosity to learn the ins and outs.” In fact, as perhaps one of the lab’s final acts some 25 years later, ED011 even played a role in solving one of the most mysterious cases of malware in recent history. https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...4fd5bec7f5.png Vampi meets a hero, Linus Torvalds (left), circa 1995. Just like in ED011, the lights stay dim for this particular gathering of hackers. But the year is 2017, and there are hundreds of security researchers filling a massive room. It’s the Kaspersky Lab’s Security Analyst Summit, a conference that’s sort of like a hacker’s version of America’s Got Talent. An ED011 alumnus wearing a leather jacket has taken the stage: Costin Raiu, the current lead of Kaspersky Lab’s squad that investigates cyber espionage campaigns. A photo of the University Politehnica of Bucharest even appears during his opening speech. Raiu has been working to unravel the latest findings on one of the most mysterious cyber espionage operation in history: the Moonlight Maze, an initiative that targeted the Pentagon and NASA in the late 1990s. Its tools are now two decades old, but the new evidence these researchers found suggests it’s connected to the Russian-speaking group Turla, which conducted massive spy campaigns up until recently in Western Europe (largely targeting governments and militaries). Moonlight Maze is one of the first widely known cyber espionage operations, yet researchers had little information about it until recently—most of the evidence was previously destroyed. But in 2016, a former sysadmin in the UK named David Hedges gave security experts a server he used back in the 1990s to track the gang’s every move. Raiu took the new evidence and ran with it, analyzing attack vectors and looking at computer code written for SPARC machines. He worked for a year together with his then-colleague Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade and with researchers Thomas Rid and Daniel Moore of King’s College London. And if you ask Raiu, his journey to this stage to announce these prolific findings started in a familiar yet unassuming place. “[ED011] was the home of some of the best hackers in the world,” Raiu tells the audience of the conference. “I’ve watched all these people in amazement.” Speaking to Ars after the conference, Raiu says he started going to ED011 as a freshman in 1996. He would wake up each morning at 5:30am, grab a quick bite, and take the subway to Politehnica. He would stand in line, in front of the door, and burst inside when it opened, running to be one of the first to grab a seat at one of the computers. At that time, he was working on RAV, an antivirus software he started developing while in high school. It reached 10 million users worldwide and was acquired by Microsoft in 2003. While in the ED011 computer lab, Raiu would spend hours learning on the notorious ilf.net (The International Liberation Front), where malware authors published their work. “It had links to hundreds of archives of malware samples, from boring ones to really interesting and rare ones,” Raiu tells me. “I’d make sure that my antivirus program was always able to detect all the malware samples, which made it pretty known in Romania and later, outside the country.” The lab itself, however, had plenty to teach. Raiu says Lari and the other students who hung out in ED011 showcased remarkable skills. “They were hacking into army.mil, they were hacking into nasa.gov simply to challenge each other and to see who has the most root shells [becoming superusers and executing commands] on army.mil,” Raiu explains. “Some said they had root shells on NASA computers. Others said they had access to supercomputers from all around the world, from the US to Japan.” He recalls many had their computer screens dimmed, so that sysadmins wouldn’t see what they were doing. But ultimately these students were doing it just for the lulz, Raiu says. “99 percent of all the high-profile hacks [back then] were just enthusiasts, kids challenging each other to see who can access the most data. And only 1 percent of all the high-profile hacks were government-sponsored.” Today, he says, it’s the exact opposite: 99 percent of all the high-profile hacks are governments spying on each other. https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...5d7deb5e06.png The welcome screen for Meet, a telnet-based chat application For its last act, saving the world While working on the Moonlight Maze case, Costin Raiu remembered how brilliant Lari was and how much he learned by watching him (Lari gave up hacking in 1996—the year Raiu first arrived at ED011). The first notable ED011 hacker now writes code and works as a system administrator somewhere in Western Europe, and he’s praised for his intelligence and creativity. Most of the other hackers have moved on to other things, too. Ender has traveled the world and has worked for various technology companies from both hemispheres. Vampi dreams of robots while doing his support job. (He’s wearing braces to correct his pointy teeth, and by autumn he says he won’t be Vampi anymore.) Stefan Puscasu is still a sysadmin of the University Politehnica of Bucharest, yet students don’t write unorthodox words on his door anymore. He often bumps into Lil’ Guy on campus. By a twist of fate, Lil’ Guy ended up teaching computer networks in ED011. He would often tell his students to do hands-on projects and not only stick to theory. But in the early 2000s, soon after Lil’ Guy, Zombie, Therion, and Dave graduated, ED011 lost its traditional purpose. Romania got warp speed Internet connections, meaning curious students could work elsewhere. The country also addressed computer hacking issues by pushing through harsh legislation, meaning the days of rogue pentesting were through. Worldwide, the security industry changed as well. Companies started to run extensive background checks when they hired an expert, and black hats weren’t welcomed in the legitimate industry. Today, kids like the young Lari can only hack the Pentagon through bug bounty programs without risking jail. Lari is grateful, though, that he was a student in the 1990s in Romania, witnessing the early age of the world-wide Web and enjoying the rebel culture that flared up after the collapse of communism. If he were the dean of computer science today, he would set up computer labs for AI, robotics, and security with unlimited coffee, opened 24/7, he tells me. “Students are bold and full of energy. Universities need to sharpen their creativity.” What made ED011 unique was the total freedom it granted, he says, the freedom to explore new ideas and approaches and to learn computer science thoroughly. “Nobody would be able to duplicate what happened there.” https://arstechnica.com/features/201...ked-the-world/ |
See Technicolor Food Photos from Original Soviet Cookbooks BY ANIKA BURGESS OCTOBER 16, 2015 https://assets.atlasobscura.com/arti...9869/image.jpg Kefir, a fermented milk drink from the Caucasus Mountains and one of the staples of a Soviet diet. The accompanying recipe in the CCCP Cookbook is for Dovga Soup, an Azerbaijani yogurt soup.IN 1939, THE INSTITUTE OF Nutrition of the Academy of Medical Scientists in the USSR published The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. It was filled with praise for the domestic food industry, and had lush color photographs accompanying recipes gathered from all corners of the vast Soviet realm. The reality of Soviet cuisine was a different story. Individual and artisanal production of food was banned in the mid-1930s as collective farming began. Ingredients were limited and the quality of food varied wildly. But families of government workers had access to goods that were otherwise nearly impossible to buy, such as caviar, cigarettes and sugar. A new book by Olga and Pavel Syutkin, called the CCCP Cookbook: True Stories of Soviet Cuisine, offers an illuminating glimpse of food during this era, and includes recipes and photographs from original Soviet cookbooks. Atlas Obscura has photographs from the book. https://assets.atlasobscura.com/arti...9871/image.jpg Anastas Mikoyan helped bring mass production of ice cream to the USSR in the 1930s after visiting the United States. His interest was noted by Stalin, who said, “You, Anastas, care more about ice cream, than about communism.” Still, the cone above is embellished with the letters CCCP. https://assets.atlasobscura.com/arti...9865/image.jpg Fish sprats, for a Mimosa Salad, of potatoes, eggs, carrots, mayonnaise and of course, fish. https://assets.atlasobscura.com/arti...9867/image.jpg Shashlik, a form of skewered meat cooked over an open fire, and associated with the Caucasus region. https://assets.atlasobscura.com/arti...9870/image.jpg An elaborately garnished pike perch set in aspic. https://assets.atlasobscura.com/arti...9862/image.jpg Steak and onions, accompanied in the CCCP Cookbook with a recipe for the same. https://assets.atlasobscura.com/arti...9872/image.jpg Caviar. Those that worked for the State could access luxury goods like caviar; ordinary citizens would need to make an application to access it on national holidays or special occasions, such as weddings. https://assets.atlasobscura.com/arti...9866/image.jpg Pelmeni, or dumplings, usually served with butter or as in this photo, sour cream. https://assets.atlasobscura.com/arti...9873/image.jpg Suckling Pig with Buckwheat. Suckling pig was a traditional Russian dish that was featured as part of a meal in Chekhov’s 1892 novel The Wife. https://assets.atlasobscura.com/arti...9863/image.jpg Soviet mayonnaise, for the Stolichny Salad recipe. Mayonnaise became popular in the USSR as it was easy to mass produce. https://assets.atlasobscura.com/arti...9864/image.jpg A table set for a dinner of Chicken Kiev. Communal apartments were standard in Soviet cities, where families had one room for themselves and shared the common areas with between two and seven families. https://assets.atlasobscura.com/arti...9874/image.jpg The cover of the CCCP Cookbook, available from Fuel Publishing. https://www.atlasobscura.com/article...viet-cookbooks |
The Perfect Art Heist: Hack the Money, Leave the Painting https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg Thieves didn’t even bother with a London art gallery’s Constable landscape—and they still walked away with $3 million. Text by James Tarmy, Illustrations by Anna Haifisch https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/.../v0/640x-1.jpg https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2...ect-art-heist/ |
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