Tag: function-showmenu

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

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

The hardest and easiest languages to learn for native English speakers

The Foreign Service Institute has ranked the difficulty of learning a language for English speakers. From Blazepress : Languages based upon Latin, such as French, Spanish and Italian are some of the easiest to pick up and are placed in ‘Category I’ languages with an estimated learning time of around 6 months. Languages such as Japanese, Korean and Arabic are placed in ‘Category V,’ and can take considerably longer and an estimated 2 years to master properly. Check out the rest on the map below.

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The hardest and easiest languages to learn for native English speakers

Making rubber bands is incredibly labor intensive

Wow. I had no idea that making rubber bands was so labor intensive. Can you imagine the resources it took just to get this long process in place? This footage is from the show How It’s Made . An older (but worse quality) video exists and shares that this factory makes 40 million rubber bands a day.

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Making rubber bands is incredibly labor intensive

Researchers infuse plants with chemicals to glow for hours

MIT researchers have figured out how to infuse common plants like watercress and arugula with luciferase, the chemical that makes fireflies glow. The process make the plants emit a dim glow for up to four hours. Via MIT : Previous efforts to create light-emitting plants have relied on genetically engineering plants to express the gene for luciferase, but this is a laborious process that yields extremely dim light. Those studies were performed on tobacco plants and Arabidopsis thaliana, which are commonly used for plant genetic studies. However, the method developed by Strano’s lab could be used on any type of plant. So far, they have demonstrated it with arugula, kale, and spinach, in addition to watercress. For future versions of this technology, the researchers hope to develop a way to paint or spray the nanoparticles onto plant leaves, which could make it possible to transform trees and other large plants into light sources. “Our target is to perform one treatment when the plant is a seedling or a mature plant, and have it last for the lifetime of the plant,” Strano says. “Our work very seriously opens up the doorway to streetlamps that are nothing but treated trees, and to indirect lighting around homes.” • Engineers create plants that glow (MIT)

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Researchers infuse plants with chemicals to glow for hours

King Tut exhibition starts its final world tour in Los Angeles (March 2018)

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of discovering the tomb of King Tut, many of the Boy King’s artifacts and other ancient Egyptian items will be touring the United States in the new year. Lonely Planet writes : The largest ever international exhibition of ancient Egyptian artefacts from the tomb of its most famous pharaoh will open early next year in Los Angeles. King Tut: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh will visit ten different cities as it tours the world starting off on the West Coast of America on 24 March. More than 150 items from Tutankhamun’s tomb will be on display at the California Science Center. The exhibition will be an absolute treat for Egyptologists – both amateur and professional – as never before have so many ancient items associated with King Tut been on display together outside Egypt. Many of the items would have been used by the Boy King himself including golden jewellery, elaborate carvings, sculptures, and ritual antiquities. Forty per cent of the objects will be leaving home for both the first and last time before returning for permanent display in the Grand Egyptian Museum , which is currently under construction. You can first see the exhibit in Los Angeles before it heads to Europe and then to its new permanent home at The Grand Egyptian Museum (which is located near the Pyramids of Giza). Be sure to pre-register for the L.A. exhibit now. https://youtu.be/YTP3pZyzb_U Of course you can’t talk about a King Tut without being reminded of Steve Martin’s bit on Saturday Night Live in 1978. The now-39-year-old sketch was satire on the Tutankhamun exhibit’s popularity when it traveled the US from 1976 to 1979. It has recently come under fire for being racist (“That’s like somebody … making a song just littered with the n-word everywhere”) by some Reed College students : https://youtu.be/FYbavuReVF4 Biggest ever King Tut exhibition coming to America next year Thanks, Karen!

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King Tut exhibition starts its final world tour in Los Angeles (March 2018)

Watch this experiment on mice squeezing through tiny holes

Woodworker Matthias Wandel has mice in his workshop, and he wanted to see how small a hole mice could crawl through . But after setting up his ingenious little test, a challenger appears: the wily shrew! (more…)

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Watch this experiment on mice squeezing through tiny holes