Got an old printer lying around? Don’t know what to do with it? Well Andreas Fiessler had the best idea yet: use the print head mechanism and a microcontroller to turn it into a machine with eight switches that turns them off when you turn them on. Truly magnificent.
Hawaiian Islands are dissolving, study says
Brigham Young University press release:
Someday, Oahu’s Koolau and Waianae mountains will be reduced to nothing more than a flat, low-lying island like Midway.
But erosion isn’t the biggest culprit. Instead, scientists say, the mountains of Oahu are actually dissolving from within.
…
According to the researchers’ estimates, the net effect is that Oahu will continue to grow for as long as 1.5 million years. Beyond that, the force of groundwater will eventually triumph and the island will begin its descent to a low-lying topography.
You all better get your sightseeing done now before it’s too late!
Styles and Themes of Hayao Miyazaki
Wikipedia:
Hayao Miyazaki is a prominent Japanese filmmaker and producer whose animated works are characterised by several recurring themes and motifs.
Many of these recurrent features are notable for being so uncommon in the medium, for example the lack of evil or villain characters, the advocacy of a pacifist ethic and prominence of feminism. Other features are more notable for being personal idiosyncrasies, such as the obsession with flight and the symbolism of water. The formal emphasis placed on these various elements constitutes a running discourse that transcends the individual works and creates a larger, ongoing meta-narrative.
Really good article. Also Miyazaki is literally the best. Just the best.
Merry Christmas! I’ve sure you have much better things to do today than spend a few seconds on Tumblr, so thanks for spending a little bit of your time with us today! Or tomorrow, whenever it is you’re reading this.
Today I’d like to post my favorite Christmas video of all time, “Joe Pesci with His Head on Fire.”
Mele Kalikimaka, from us to you. Here’s Amy Hanaiali’i and Jake Shimabukuro with “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”, live at the Blaisdell.
International Cycling Union introduces equal prize money for women and men
Short news story by Gregory Blachier for Reuters (couldn’t really find anything more substantial to link):
Female riders will earn as much as their male counterparts at cycling World Championships from next year, the governing body of the sport said on Friday.
Apparently this didn’t happen before, so hooray for progress!
I also enjoyed the final sentence:
Money has been an issue in some sports including tennis, with some men complaining about women having equal prize money at grand slam events despite playing shorter matches.
Peter Reinhardt:
About a century ago, an adventurous Scandinavian discovered the first black thorium rock on a remote island in the Norwegian Sea. Now thorium is slowly heating up debates about the future of nuclear power, energy independence, and global warming.
I wanted to get to the bottom of this surge in nuclear enthusiasm, and I was inspired by Peter Thiel’s lecture on energy markets. This post encapsulates the surprising things I learned about thorium and nuclear reactors.
Great piece.
New York Stock Exchange sold to a rival exchange
Steve Rothwell for the Associated Press:
In a deal that highlights the dwindling stature of what was once a centerpiece of capitalism, the New York Stock Exchange is being sold to a little-known rival for $8 billion — $3 billion less than it would have fetched in a proposed takeover just last year.
The buyer is IntercontinentalExchange, a 12-year-old exchange headquartered in Atlanta that deals in investing contracts known as futures.
It honestly never occurred to me until reading this story that one could buy or sell a stock exchange. But then, it’s got to be operated by someone, right? In this case, the parent company is NYSE Euronext, which IntercontinentalExchange has acquired in this deal.
Data teleportation: The quantum space race
Great profile piece from Zeeya Merali published in Nature:
Three years ago, Jian-Wei Pan brought a bit of Star Trek to the Great Wall of China. From a site near the base of the wall in the hills north of Beijing, he and his team of physicists from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei aimed a laser at a detector on a rooftop 16 kilometres away, then used the quantum properties of the laser’s photons to ‘teleport’ information across the intervening space. At the time, it was a world distance record for quantum teleportation, and a major step towards the team’s ultimate aim of teleporting photons to a satellite.
The piece details both Pan and also his relationship with frenemy Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna. Great human story and also the science is fucking mindblowing holy shit.
Iowa court: Bosses can fire ‘irresistible’ workers
From the I Just Fucking Hate Everything Department comes this piece of legal news by Ryan J. Foley for the Associated Press:
A dentist acted legally when he fired an assistant that he found attractive simply because he and his wife viewed the woman as a threat to their marriage, the all-male Iowa Supreme Court ruled Friday.
The court ruled 7-0 that bosses can fire employees they see as an “irresistible attraction,” even if the employees have not engaged in flirtatious behavior or otherwise done anything wrong.
My favorite part of the article, by which I mean the part of the article that finally opened my eyes to the true horror of this empty universe and made me futilely scream into the maw of oblivion, was this one:
[Melissa] Nelson filed a lawsuit alleging gender discrimination, arguing she would not have been terminated if she was male. She did not allege sexual harassment because Knight’s conduct may not have risen to that level and didn’t particularly offend her, [her attorney Paige] Fiedler said.
This is not at all bad out of context, but the important part is how it relates to two previous sentences:
… in the final months of her employment, [boss James Knight] complained that her tight clothing was distracting, once telling her that if his pants were bulging that was a sign her clothes were too revealing, according to the opinion.
He also once allegedly remarked about her infrequent sex life by saying, “that’s like having a Lamborghini in the garage and never driving it.”
The chain of events set in motion by the Big Bang 13.75 billion years ago has lead to a point where this is not considered sexual harassment.
My soul weeps.