The claim that binaural beats simulate the effect of recreational drugs enjoys little scientific support. But Dr. Sargan Al Meheini of the United Arab Emirates’ Police Sciences Academy says the dreamy, weirdly rhythmic music should be dealt with like cannabis and ecstasy .
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"Police scientist" in UAE: binaural music is "digital drug", ban it
Peter Gibson is my new hero, not because he’s questioning the existence of non-celiac gluten intolerance. But because he was so willing to repeat, and challenge, his own research.
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Scientist who proved existence of gluten intolerance challenges himself
Here’s a great, simple Make project that teaches you how to make an intercom from a pair of old, corded phones, a 9V battery and a resistor. I loved walkie-talkies and intercoms when I was a kid — the idea of setting up your own house-wide wireline intercom is super-cool, and the project is dead-simple. * At its most basic level, a telephone network is just two microphones, two speakers and a power source. In this project we are reducing the phone to these basic elements. The handset of the phone contains the speaker, the microphone and any necessary processing circuitry. All we need to add is the power source. * A regular corded telephone doesn’t require much electricity to operate. It just needs about 9 volts and less than 30mA. It normally gets this from the phone line itself. This is why many phones can still work even during a blackout. However in this project, we are using a single 9 volt battery to power our phones. * The battery is wired in series with a 300 ohm resistor and connected to either the red wire or the green wire in a phone cord. The phone cord is then plugged into both phones. The battery is able to supply enough electricity to power the speaker and microphone circuits of both phones. This allows you to use them to talk back and forth. Simple Intercom From a Pair of Old Corded Phones [Jason Poel Smith/Make]
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HOWTO make an intercom out of obsolete corded phones
In this video from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), Louis of BHQF teaches you how to silkscreen, right in your bathroom.
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HOWTO silkscreen at home
At our sponsor Intel’s LifeScoop site, I posted about ” Music That Writes Itself “: In ambient music pioneer Brian Eno’s 1996 book A Year with Swollen Appendices, the composer wrote, “I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: ‘you mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?’” Eno was talking about generative music, a process by which a computer creates unique works from fixed parameters set by the artist. In its simplest form, you twist a few knobs (virtual or otherwise) and the computer takes it from there, creating music that can be credited to the system itself. The term generative art is most likely derived from “generative grammar,” a linguistic theory Noam Chomsky first proposed in his book Syntactic Structures (1965) to refer to deep-seated rules that describe any language. Steven Holtzman, author of Digital Mosaics (1997), traces the art form to the dawn of the information age in the 1960s, when musicians like Gottfried Michael Koenig and Iannis Xenakis pioneered computer composition. Decades later, a number of generative music apps are bringing Eno’s vision to our smartphones. ” Music That Writes Itself ”
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Generative music apps
This video is a bit gruesome, but it is demonstrating a remarkable substance that can stop bleeding almost instantaneously. Jack Millner of Humans Invent interviewed NYU student Joe Landolina, the creator of Veti-Gel. “In all of our tests we found we were able to immediately stop bleeding,” says Landolina. “Your skin has this thing called the extracellular matrix,” he explains. “It’s kind of a mesh of molecules and sugars and protein that holds your cells in place.” Landolina synthesises his own extracellular matrix (ECM) using plant polymers, which can form a liquid when broken up into pieces. He says, “So it goes into the wound and the pieces of the synthetic ECM in the gel will recognise the pieces of the real ECM in the wound and they’ll link together. It will re-assemble into something that looks like, feels like and acts like skin.” The gel that stops bleeding instantly
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The gel that stops bleeding instantly
You may have heard that Amazon is selling a “KEEP CALM AND RAPE A LOT” t-shirt. How did such a thing come to pass? Well, as Pete Ashton explains, this is a weird outcome of an automated algorithm that just tries random variations on “KEEP CALM AND,” offering them for sale in Amazon’s third-party marketplace and printing them on demand if any of them manage to find a buyer. The t-shirts are created by an algorithm. The word “algorithm” is a little scary to some people because they don’t know what it means. It’s basically a process automated by a computer programme, sometimes simple, sometimes complex as hell. Amazon’s recommendations are powered by an algorithm. They look at what you’ve been browsing and buying, find patterns in that behaviour and show you things the algorithm things you might like to buy. Amazons algorithms are very complex and powerful, which is why they work. The algorithm that creates these t-shirts is not complex or powerful. This is how I expect it works. 1) Start a sentence with the words KEEP CALM AND. 2) Pick a word from this long list of verbs. Any word will do. Don’t worry, I’m sure they’re all fine. 3) Finish the sentence with one of the following: OFF, THEM, IF, THEM or US. 4) Lay these words out in the classic Keep Calm style. 5) Create a mockup jpeg of a t-shirt. 6) Submit the design to Amazon using our boilerplate t-shirt description. 7) Go back to 1 and start again. There are currently 529,493 Solid Gold Bomb clothing items on Amazon. Assuming they survive this and don’t get shitcanned by Amazon I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they top a million in a few months. It costs nothing to create the design, nothing to submit it to Amazon and nothing for Amazon to host the product. If no-one buys it then the total cost of the experiment is effectively zero. But if the algorithm stumbles upon something special, something that is both unique and funny and actually sells, then everyone makes money. Dictionary + algorithm + PoD t-shirt printer + lucrative meme = rape t-shirts on Amazon
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How an algorithm came up with Amazon’s KEEP CALM AND RAPE A LOT t-shirt
Seattle’s police force were very hot-to-trot for a pair of new surveillance drones, an issue that became a lightning rod for criticism of the scandal-haunted force. After public outcry, the city’s mayor simply returned the UAVs to their manufacturer Later this afternoon, Mayor Mike McGinn will announce that he is grounding the Seattle Police Department’s controversial drone program and returning the two remotely controlled planes to the vendor, according to sources at City Hall who asked not to be named. “The mayor and chief had a conversation and agreed it was time to end the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle program,” one of the sources tells us. “It had become a distraction to the two things the department is working hard on, general public safety and community-building work.” The news comes on the heels of—and largely in response to—an angry hearing yesterday held by Seattle City Council member Bruce Harrell, who was considering legislation to restrict the use of the drones for police investigations. The program has created a slowly burning outcry since 2010, when the city purchased the units for intelligence gathering with the help of a federal Homeland Security grant. Crime Mayor Will Kill SPD’s Drone Program [Dominic Holden/The Stranger] ( Thanks, Fipi Lele! )
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Seattle Mayor returns police drones to the manufacturer
Ron Nixon: “The Postal Service is expected to announce on Wednesday morning that it will stop delivering letters and other mail on Saturdays, but continue to handle packages , a move the financially struggling agency said would save about $2 billion annually as it looks for ways to cut cost.” [NYT]
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USPS ending saturday letter delivery
The ACLU points to the TSA’s recently-issued “ Market Research Announcement ,” “in which the agency expresses a desire to expand its Pre-Check whitelist program by allowing private companies to carry out risk analysis of Americans that would determine whether they are ‘trusted’ enough to participate in the trusted traveler program.” If this comes to pass, it would represent a big step toward transforming the TSA’s Pre-Check whitelist into the sort of passenger profiling system proposed under the Bush Administration post-9/11.
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TSA again weighs possibility of using commercial data to profile air travelers