The Magic Mountain Lodge is a luxury resort set in a private nature preserve in the mountains of Chile. It’s built to resemble a hollowed-out mountain. Fountains at the top can pour water over the surface, making it look like a series of caves in a waterfall. You can view more pictures at the link. The photos showing the lodge after heavy snowfall are particularly striking.
Official Website -via Offbeat Home
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Magic Mountain Lodge
Got
cash? Not necessary in Sweden, who has gone (mostly) cashless:
Sweden was the first European country to introduce bank notes in
1661. Now it’s come farther than most on the path toward getting rid
of them. […]In most Swedish cities, public buses don’t accept cash; tickets
are prepaid or purchased with a cell phone text message. A small but
growing number of businesses only take cards, and some bank offices
— which make money on electronic transactions — have stopped
handling cash altogether.“There are towns where it isn’t at all possible anymore to
enter a bank and use cash,” complains Curt Persson, chairman of
Sweden’s National Pensioners’ Organization.
The upside? Crimes are down:
The number of bank robberies in Sweden plunged from 110 in 2008
to 16 in 2011 — the lowest level since it started keeping records
30 years ago. It says robberies of security transports are also down.“Less cash in circulation makes things safer, both for the
staff that handle cash, but also of course for the public,” says
Par Karlsson, a security expert at the organization.
Continued here:
Cash is King, Except in Sweden
3-24-12 – AT&T rips you off, NASA’s Virtual doctors and more!
peetm sends this quote from the BBC:
“When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, both Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy sent troops to help the nationalists under Franco. But with the conflict dispersed across the country, some means of secure communication was needed for the German Condor Legion, the Italians and the Spanish forces under Franco. As a result, a set of modified commercial Enigma machines were delivered by Germany. … A key figure in trying to understand it was Dilly Knox, a classicist who had been working on breaking ciphers since World War I. He was fascinated by the machine and began studying ways in which an intercepted message might in theory be broken, even writing his own messages, encrypting them and then trying to break them himself. But there was no opportunity to actually intercept a real message since German military signals were inaudible in Britain. However, the signals produced by the machines sent to Spain in 1936 were audible enough to be intercepted and Knox began work. … Within six or seven months of having his first real code to crack, Knox had succeeded, producing the first decryption of an Enigma message in April 1937.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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The Spanish Link In Cracking the Enigma Code
Feast
your eyes on this, Neatoramanauts: the world’s first diamond ring. But
but, you say, diamond rings have been around forever. Yes, but not like
this: a ring carved straight out of a single giant 150-carat diamond,
by Shawish Jewelry.
Yours for a mere $70 million.
Taken from:
World’s First All-Diamond Ring
[Thanks, Souheil]
US Army debuts app marketplace prototype: iOS first, Android coming soon originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Mar 2012 20:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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US Army debuts app marketplace prototype: iOS first, Android coming soon
ananyo writes “Researchers have made a cloak that can hide objects from static magnetic fields, realizing a theoretical prediction they made last year. This ‘antimagnet’ could have medical applications, but could also be used to subvert airport security. The cloak’s interior is lined with turns of tape made from a high-temperature superconductor. Superconductors repel magnetic fields, so any magnetic field enclosed within a superconductor would be undetectable from outside. But the superconductor itself would still perturb an external magnetic field, so the researchers coated its external side with an ordinary ferromagnet. The superconductor tries to repel external field lines, whereas the ferromagnet tries to draw them in — together, the two layers cancel each other out (abstract).”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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'Antimagnet' Cloak Hides Objects From Magnetic Fields
The US Military is sitting on a potential 7GW of untapped solar power capacity in the Mojave and Colorado Deserts, according to a recent Department of Defense report that analyzed the applicability of a variety of solar technologies across seven military installations.
Initially nine military installations were analyzed, seven in California and two in Nevada, taking in sites used by the Army, Navy, and Air Force as well as the Marine Corps. By comparing competing solar energy technologies on such a large scale, the report (titled Solar Energy Development on Department of Defense Installations in the Mojave and Colorado Deserts, available in PDF on the ESTCP website) gives insight as to the commercial viability of solar power in the US today.
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California DoD bases sitting on 7 gigawatts of solar potential
Whoever told you that money cannot buy happiness is bat shit crazy, because Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Paul Allen is living an extraordinary life. On Wednesday, Forbes reported Allen is donating $300 million of his $14 billion fortune in his eponymous Allen Institute for Brain Science to fund new projects to map and observe the human brain and, in Allen’s words, “to one day understand the essence of what makes us human.” That brings the total amount Allen has invested in the Institute to $500 million. The announcement was made at a press conference today in Seattle and in a commentary in Nature, one of the world’s best scientific journals, written by Christof Koch, the Institute’s Chief Scientific Officer, and R. Clay Reid of Harvard Medical School. They lay out a way of doing brain research that involves optogenetics, a kind of deep stimulation of the brain using light, connectomics, the study of connections in the brain, and brain observatories, ways of monitoring what happens in the brain in real time.
Allen said he’s not interested in collecting intellectual property. The goal is to create open science at an industrial scale. The institute says that every month 50,000 scientists access its brain map data. “We know that such an expensive project will have critics,” Koch and Reid write. “The resources required could fund hundreds of other projects, so why focus them in this way? Our response is that funding agencies are already spending billions of dollars on many smaller projects across all areas of biomedical research, and the Allen Institute wants to pioneer a new approach. We want to understand one piece of brain tissue by integrating knowledge across techniques and scales, rather than distributing the funds more widely.” Ed Boyden, an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab who is one of the pioneers in the field of optogenetics, echoed that sentiment. “The Allen Institute is assembling an extraordinary set of tools to tackle brain circuitry in a vertically integrated way, from the parts lists to how they all work together,” he wrote via Facebook chat. “It is impossible for an ordinary lab group to bring all these pieces together.”
Allen’s remarks are eloquent, inspiring, and incredibly powerful, and Forbes has included them in their feature article which you can read by visiting Forbes.com. To learn more about the extraordinary work being done by Paul Allen’s institute be sure to visit AllenInstitute.org. For more fascinating stories about the human brain you can visit The Human Brain on FEELguide.
Sources: Jason Silva on Facebook and ForbesRead More:
The WOW Files: Billionaire Paul Allen Pouring $500M Into Quest To Find Essence Of Humanity In Brain
AT&T improperly received millions of dollars from a government reimbursement fund by ignoring fraudulent use of the IP Relay call system provided free of charge to hearing- and speech-impaired US residents, the US government alleged this week.
“The United States brings this action to recover millions of dollars that have been paid to Defendant AT&T for its improper handling and billing of thousands of Internet Protocol Relay calls made by Nigerian and other international users seeking to defraud merchants in the United States,” the US said in a complaint filed yesterday in US District Court in Western Pennsylvania.
The US government reimburses IP Relay providers $1.30 per minute, but calls originating outside the US and calls made by people without a hearing impairment are ineligible for reimbursement. IP Relay allows hearing-impaired users to place phone calls by typing messages into an Internet-based system. The messages are relayed to the intended recipient by assistants employed by AT&T and other providers. The FCC started requiring providers to verify the accuracy of each user’s name and mailing address in 2009, but AT&T found a way to skirt the rules, the Justice Department said.
“The complaint alleges that, out of fears that fraudulent call volume would drop after the registration deadline, AT&T knowingly adopted a non-compliant registration system that did not verify whether the user was located within the United States,” Justice officials said in a press release. “The complaint further contends that AT&T continued to employ this system even with the knowledge that it facilitated use of IP Relay by fraudulent foreign callers, which accounted for up to 95 percent of AT&T’s call volume. The government’s complaint alleges that AT&T improperly billed the TRS (Telecommunications Relay Services) Fund for reimbursement of these calls and received millions of dollars in federal payments as a result.”
In a statement e-mailed to Ars, AT&T said it follows the FCC’s rules. “AT&T has followed the FCC’s rules for providing IP Relay services for disabled customers and for seeking reimbursement for those services,” AT&T spokesperson Marty Richter said. “As the FCC is aware, it is always possible for an individual to misuse IP Relay services, just as someone can misuse the postal system or an email account, but FCC rules require that we complete all calls by customers who identify themselves as disabled.” AT&T’s statement did not say whether it verified the location of users as required by the government.
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AT&T collected millions from taxpayers in fraudulent charges, US says