Tech Today w/ Ken May

WrongSizeGlass writes “A team of computer scientists at two University of California campuses has been looking deeply into the nature of spam, and they think found a 'choke point' [PDF] that could greatly reduce the flow of spam. It turned out that 95 percent of the credit card transactions for the spam-advertised drugs and herbal remedies they bought were handled by just three financial companies — one based in Azerbaijan, one in Denmark and one in Nevis, in the West Indies. If a handful of companies like these refused to authorize online credit card payments to the merchants, 'you'd cut off the money that supports the entire spam enterprise,' said one of the scientists.”
Frequent Slashdot contributor (and author of a book on Digital Cash) Peter Wayner wonders if “the way to get a business shut down is to send out a couple billion spam messages in its name.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View the original here:
A New Approach To Reducing Spam: Go After Credit Processors

As much as I love my Nook, that lag while scrolling is so annoying I wanna throw it across the room sometimes. Even though we shouldn’t expect new displays this year, Bookeen is onto something here. More

German photographer Markus Reugels specializes in high-speed photography, and captures a lot of images of water drops. By adding chemicals to the water and raising his shutter speed to one sixteen thousandth of a second, he’s been able to take some truly amazing shots:

By thickening the water with guar gum he was also able to alter the shape of the splashes, making some of them take on the bizarre look of something from a science-fiction film or a nuclear mushroom cloud.

The shapes, which varied from 3cm to 15cm, were altered even further by adding sugar and, by putting rinse aid in the dish, he was able to increase the height of the droplet splashes.

His images on Flickr are really amazing. You really should check them out.

Article Link and Flickr Photostream via reddit

Continued here:
Markus Reugels’s Water Drops

We love both mobile operating systems and their corresponding devices, but just like Android has its many advantages so does iOS. Here are our favorite parts of iOS that outdo their Android counterparts. More

We use the term “snake oil” for anything promoted as a cure-all that doesn’t work, whether it is medicine or political policy. But back in the 1860s, Chinese immigrants who worked on the Transcontinental Railroad used oil from the Chinese water snake to treat sore muscles, and it worked!

A 2007 story in Scientific American explains that California neurophysiology researcher Richard Kunin made the connection between Chinese water snakes and omega-3 fatty acids in the 1980s.

“Kunin visited San Francisco’s Chinatown to buy such snake oil and analyze it. According to his 1989 analysis published in the Western Journal of Medicine, Chinese water-snake oil contains 20 percent eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), one of the two types of omega-3 fatty acids most readily used by our bodies. Salmon, one of the most popular food sources of omega-3s, contains a maximum of 18 percent EPA, lower than that of snake oil.”

However, it wasn’t until several years after Kunin’s research that American scientists discovered that omega-3s are vital for human metabolism. Not only do they sooth inflammation in muscles and joints, but also, they can help “cognitive function and reduce blood pressure, cholesterol, and even depression.”

So how did “snake oil” come to mean a scam? The rest of the story is at Collectors Weekly. Link -Thanks, Ben!

Read the article:
How Snake Oil Got a Bad Rap

In this week’s New Yorker, Michael Specter takes a great look at the world of in-vitro meat—grown in a lab, outside an animal body. It's not a matter of if, but when. Will you eat it? More

You're probably on camera right now. Wave hello. If you were wearing this line of Cold Flare jewelry from a pair of ITP students, you'd be invisible—or at least, anonymous(er). More

Liquid crystals – yes the same as the ones in your calculator — may soon save lives: they’ll be detecting deadly bacterial infections. It turns out liquid crystals are incredibly sensitive to endotoxin, a lipid that’s found on the outside of many bacteria, including E. coli and Salmonella. More

It’s disappointing that in his speech earlier today, Barack Obama didn’t tackle America’s dangerous dependence on foreign olive oil:

It seems to me that the California Olive Oil Council needs to develop a more robust lobbying/pr effort to raise awareness on this front. I’m eager to offer my services!

Taken from:
The United States of America Consumes 8 Percent Of World’s Olive Oil, Produces Just 0.1 Percent

The Nielsen Company’s most recent research on mobile connected devices sheds new light on how consumers are using their tablets, eReaders and smartphones – and where they are using them, too. According to Nielsen’s recent survey of nearly 12,000 connected device owners:

• Seventy percent of tablet owners and 68 percent of smartphone owners said they use their devices while watching television, compared to only 35 percent of eReader owners.
• Sixty-one percent of eReader owners use their device in bed, compared to 57 percent of tablet owners and 51 percent of smartphone owners.

But just how much time are tablet, eReader, and smartphone owners spending using their device while watching TV or lying in bed?

When asked how they spent time with their device:

• Tablet owners said 30 percent of their time spent with their device was while watching TV compared to 21 percent lying in bed.
• Smartphone owners say that 20 percent of the time they use their smartphones is while watching TV, compared to 11 percent lying in bed.
• eReader owners indicated only 15 percent of their eReader time was spent watching TV, though they spent a whopping 37 percent of their device usage time in bed.
• 

Link:
In the U.S., Tablets are TV Buddies while eReaders Make Great Bedfellows