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How to make a shiv with hard, dried fish

Katsuobushi (aka bonito) is dried, fermented and smoked tuna and it’s incredibly hard. It’s so hard that it’s possible to fashion a shiv out of it. To do so, you’ll need a mandoline, an adjustable wrench, a metal file, a vise to hold it in, an oven, a whetstone and some patience. YouTuber kiwami japan shows the way. You’ll not only get a dangerous weapon out of the deal but also a big bag of bonito flakes (which are great for making your food look like it’s moving ). ( SoraNews24 )

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How to make a shiv with hard, dried fish

World’s coolest chip runs at near absolute zero

How do you find out what happens to physics near absolute zero (aka 0 kelvin), the temperature where particle motion virtually stops? Scientists at the University of Basel might have just the device to do it. They’ve developed a nanoelectronics chip that they can successfully cool to a record-setting, bitterly cold 2.8 millikelvin. The trick involved a clever use of magnetic fields to eliminate virtually all sources of heat. The team started by using magnetic cooling (where you ramp down an applied magnetic field) to lower all the chip’s electrical connections down to 150 microkelvin. After that, they integrated another, specially constructed magnetic field system that let the researchers cool a Couloumb blockade thermometer — yes, even a thermometer’s heat is problematic when you’re edging close to absolute zero. It was successful enough that the chip could stay cold for 7 hours, which is plenty of time for tests. This is about more than bragging rights, of course. A chip that can run in such frigid conditions could help understand physics at its very limit. You might see strange behavior, for instance. It could also be helpful in creating ideal conditions for quantum physics experiments. And there’s still some room for improvement, to boot. The scientists are “optimistic” they can refine their method to lower the overall temperature to an even chillier 1 millikelvin. Via: Electronics 360 Source: University of Basel

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World’s coolest chip runs at near absolute zero

Christmas movies from before 1918

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUySE5moIFI Nothing evokes yuletide wonder quite like huddling around a modern Christmas family classic such as Die Hard or Eyes Wide Shut . But did you know that there are christmas movies more than a century old? Keep the holiday flame going through Boxing Day with the Nitrate Diva’s pick of ten pre-1918 xmas films. Embedded above is James Williamson’s joyous and celebratory 1902 The Little Match Seller , just a few minutes long.

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Christmas movies from before 1918

Latency: why typing on old computers just feels better

How long does it take, from keypress to the letter appearing on-screen, in a basic terminal window? My Core i7 PC with a GTX 1070 video card and 32gb of RAM might — might — be about as fast as 35-year-old Apple IIe. And almost nothing else is. It seems that modern computers are so complex that there are just some things they can’t do quickly . Compared to a modern computer that’s not the latest ipad pro, the apple 2 has significant advantages on both the input and the output, and it also has an advantage between the input and the output for all but the most carefully written code since the apple 2 doesn’t have to deal with context switches, buffers involved in handoffs between different processes, etc. On the input, if we look at modern keyboards, it’s common to see them scan their inputs at 100 Hz to 200 Hz (e.g., the ergodox claims to scan at 167 Hz). By comparison, the apple 2e effectively scans at 556 Hz. …If we look at the other end of the pipeline, the display, we can also find latency bloat there. I have a display that advertises 1 ms switching on the box, but if we look at how long it takes for the display to actually show a character from when you can first see the trace of it on the screen until the character is solid, it can easily be 10 ms. You can even see this effect with some high-refresh-rate displays that are sold on their allegedly good latency. Only one modern machine, doing one task, can keep up with the Apple IIe’s keyboard latency: a second-gen iPad Pro’s pencil input. Nothing else (including the iPad Pro’s own keyboard) hits 30ms. I had my own agonizing tangle with this problem. My favorite writing app, WriteRoom, is so laggy on my 12″ MacBook that I just don’t bother: an earlier version still shoots fast as lightning on a 2000s-vintage Snow Leopard iMac. Somewhere between Snow Leopard and Yosemite, between Core Duo and Core m3, between WriteRoom 2 and the most post-Lion versions, so much more horsepower is required draw words on the screen that a contemporary Mac is visibly slower than a decade-old one.

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Latency: why typing on old computers just feels better

A Christmas gift from Game Boy ROM hackers: Super Mario Land 2 in color

The Christmas holiday season is traditionally a great time to kick back and catch up on forgotten video games, and usually, we recommend doing so with majorly discounted video game sales. That’s still the case (and every platform, from Steam to Nintendo eShop to Xbox Live to PlayStation Network to GoG , seems to have a sale going on right now), but this year’s coolest holiday offer cannot be purchased: an out-of-nowhere ROM hack for one of Nintendo’s best original Game Boy games. Today, a classic-game hacker who goes by the handle Toruzz released a “ROM patch” for Nintendo’s 1992 game Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins . This 25th-anniversary release adds a “DX” suffix to the game’s name, and that’s because it’s been designed specifically to run on original Game Boy Color hardware. As a result, the ROM hack adds support for the Game Boy Color’s expanded color palette—which could run up to 56 colors on the screen simultaneously, as broken down by various sprite-specific palettes—along with support for the GBC’s faster CPU. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A Christmas gift from Game Boy ROM hackers: Super Mario Land 2 in color

Russia is planning to put a luxury hotel on the ISS

While American private corporations are working to offer paying customers a short trip to space (or the edge of it ), Russia is cooking up something grander. According to Popular Mechanics , it saw a proposal detailing Russian space corporation Roscosmos’ plan to build a luxury hotel on the ISS. Anybody whose pockets are deep enough to shell out at least $40 million for the experience can stay there for a week or two. An additional $20 million will buy them the chance to go on a spacewalk with a cosmonaut. The publication says Russian space contractor RKK Energia conjured up the strategy to be able to pay for the construction of the second module it’s building that will set it back $279 to $446 million. RKK Energia is already building the first of the two modules to serve as a science laboratory and power supply station. Although the second module has always been part of the plan, the Russian government is only paying for the first one. The tourist module will reportedly look like the first one from the outside — you can see an illustration of the science module below: [Image credit: Anatoly Zak/Russianspaceweb.com] The inside, however, will have four sleeping quarters around two cubic meters each with 9-inch windows. It will also have two “medical and hygiene” stations, as well as a lounge area with a 16-inch window — after all, if Russia wants guests to pay tens of millions, it will have to be worth it. RKK Energia is hoping to fly one or two tourists per Soyuz flight after NASA stops buying seats on the capsule for astronauts headed to the ISS, which will happen once Boeing’s and SpaceX’s commercial crew program vehicles are ready. To be able to jump-start construction, it has to find 12 (wealthy) passengers willing to pay $4 million up front. And if at least six passengers pay for a week-long stay at the space hotel per year, the company can recoup its investment within seven years. As Popular Mechanics noted, though, the ISS is scheduled to be decommissioned in 2028. The space contractor said the module takes five years to finish, so it will have to start building soon. Source: Popular Mechanics

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Russia is planning to put a luxury hotel on the ISS

An "international eye chart" from 1907

Behold the “international eye chart” designed by George Mayerle, a German optician who made his name working in San Francisco in the 1890s. Optometry was a new field back then, filled with all manners of quackery, some of which Mayerle himself engaged in. (He enthusiastically sold “Mayerle’s Eyewater”, something he claimed was “the Greatest Eye Tonic”.) But optometry was also professionalizing and becoming more research-based, and Mayerle himself pitched in by creating an eye chart designed to be used by people from a wide variety of backgrounds. San Francisco was, back then, a hotbed of immigration, and Mayerle wanted to serve the city’s polyglot community. The goal was to produce a single chart that would allow an optometrist to do an eye-test for nearly anyone who walked in the door: His eye chart, which he claimed to be “the result of many years of theoretical study and practical experience, ” combined four subjective tests done during an eye examination. Running through the middle of the chart, the seven vertical panels test for acuity of vision with characters in the Roman alphabet (for English, German, and other European readers) and also in Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Hebrew. A panel in the center replaces the alphabetic characters with symbols for children and adults who were illiterate or who could not read any of the other writing systems offered. Directly above the center panel is a version of the radiant dial that tests for astigmatism. On either side of that are lines that test the muscular strength of the eyes. Finally, across the bottom, boxes test for color vision, a feature intended especially (according to one advertisement) for those working on railroads and steamboats. The chart measures 22 by 28 inches and is printed on heavy cardboard; a positive version of it appears on one side, a negative version on the reverse. It sold for $3.00 or for $6.00 with a special cabinet designed to reveal only those parts of the chart needed at the time (“thus avoiding many unnecessary questions”). The “international” chart is an artifact of an immigrant nation—produced by a German optician in a polyglot city where West met East (and which was then undergoing massive rebuilding after the 1906 earthquake) and of a globalizing economy. One advertisement promoted it as “the only chart published that can be used by people of any nationality, ” such as might be needed by a practitioner in almost any American city. Another ad, which appeared around the same time, touted it as “the only chart. .. that can be used equally well in any part of the world. ” Mayerle’s internationalism was part of a marketing strategy, but when it suited him he could patriotically claim that his wares contributed to the project of American imperial expansion. A 1902 advertisement, for instance, boasted that a pair of his eyeglasses was used “at Manila, during the Spanish-American War, ” by none other than Admiral Dewey himself. An immigrant entrepreneur, inventing cool stuff to help serve other immigrants! It’s nice to recall the many moments in America’s past that defy the nativism of today. By the way, that passage above comes from a free PDF online book by the National Institute of Health called Hidden Treasure , which depicts amazing artifacts from the history of medicine. It’s a heck of a read. Mayerle’s on page 136. (Via Circulating Now )

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An "international eye chart" from 1907

65% of Washington DC’s Outdoor Surveillance Cameras Infiltrated by Romanian Hackers

An anonymous reader quotes The Hill: Two Romanian hackers stand accused of hacking more than 100 outdoor police security cameras in the D.C. area during the days leading up to President Trump’s inauguration, according to a court document obtained by CNN. According to an affidavit from Secret Service agent James Graham, Mihai Alexandru Isvanca and Eveline Cismaru are accused of hacking and disabling 123 out of 187 of the city’s cameras between Jan. 12 and Jan. 15… Isvanca and Cismaru are also accused in the affidavit of spreading ransomware. In a possibly-related story, the Washington Post reports: Five Romanian hackers were arrested over the past week as part of an international investigation into computer ransomware, officials in the United States and Europe said Wednesday. In six houses across Romania, law enforcement operatives from Romania, Britain, the United States and the Netherlands seized hard drives, laptops, external storage devices and documents related to malicious software called CTB-Locker or Critroini. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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65% of Washington DC’s Outdoor Surveillance Cameras Infiltrated by Romanian Hackers

Number of Births in Japan To Hit Record Low in 2017

An anonymous reader shares a report: The number of births in Japan this year has fallen to is lowest since records began more than a century ago with about 941, 000 new babies, the health ministry said on Friday, proof if any were needed that it faces an ageing and shrinking population. The number of births will be about 4 percent lower than last year and the lowest since the government started compiling data in 1899, the ministry said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Number of Births in Japan To Hit Record Low in 2017