Aadhaar kicked off in 2009, linking each Indian resident’s biometric data and sensitive personally identifying information to a unique 12-digit number. (more…)
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India’s controversial national ID scheme leaks fraud-friendly data for 130,000,000 people
Salma Hayek offers this handy guide to understanding our neighbors. Please remember: the 5th of May celebrates a Mexican victory over the French, not Mexican Independence Day which is September 16th. (h/t POCHO )
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Salma Hayek teaches some Mexican slang
HirokA1007’s youtube channel is a menagerie of enormous insects such as this Hercules beetle pupa. Below, a larva, also the size of his fist. [via JWZ ] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ1fuq8rKZQ Previously:
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Fist-sized Hercules Beetle pupa
Flashlight fish , also called lanterneye fish and scientifically photoblepharon (light-eye), are strange and wondrous creatures best viewed during a night dive in the Pacific. (more…)
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Flashlight fish have glowing lanterns below their eyes
Haha! Lucky riders on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland were treated to a live Jack Sparrow animatronics performance yesterday by Johnny Depp. He made a surprise visit to the park as part of a PR stunt. It’s fun to hear the passengers as they realize that the real Johnny Depp is standing right in front of them.
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Johnny Depp surprises Pirates of the Caribbean riders as live animatronic at Disneyland
Nintendo programmer Masahiro Sakura coded the Game Boy classic Kirby’s Dream Land on a cartridge-based Famicom console and Disk System that lacked a hardware keyboard. According to a recent presentation given by Sakura, “values had to be input using a trackball and an on-screen keyboard.” Sakura, who was 20-years-old at the time, said he just thought that was “the way it was done.” From Game Watch’s report in Japanese, translated by Source Gaming : At the time, the development tool that HAL Laboratory was using was the Twin Famicom, a console that combined the Famicom and the Famicom Disk System. A trackball made specifically for the Twin Famicom was used with the machine, which read and wrote data to a floppy disk and uploaded data to the floppy disks [during development]. Essentially, they were using a Famicom to make Famicom games. Sakurai told the crowd, “It’s like using a lunchbox to make lunch”. However, because of that, they were able to create a functional test product before the project plan was even completed. (via Ars Technica )
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Nintendo programmer coded Game Boy classic without using a keyboard
When long-lived websites close down, they often give little notice, sending archivists scrambling to rescue its work for posterity. About.com, the venerable topic-mining hive abruptly put to death, seems to be a counter-example: a faceless mountain of bland, undifferentiated, half-plagiarized content that no-one seems sad to see vanish . Even its own CEO is plainly contemptuous of it. That’s why Vogel tells Business Insider he’s going to shut the site down as of May 2nd. “I got a phone call from Joey Levin, who is the CEO of IAC [About.com Group’s parent company]. He asked, ‘What do you think of About.com?'” Vogel told BI. “My answer — in perfect arrogance — was ‘I don’t.’ Who thinks of About.com? Nobody.” But not all of About.com is going away necessarily. Vogel says he will take parts of the website and turn them into separate niche verticals, then announce a new name for the overarching brand at a conference in New Orleans. “A year ago we were a general interest site,” Vogel told The Drum in March. “We were not growing. In fact, we were kind of shrinking. We had great content, but we were doing the wrong thing.” About.com was one of the earliest big web successes to cash out: to Prime Media in 2000 for $690m, then to the New York Times in 2005 for $410m, IAC in 2012 for $300m, and now to the deep void for sweet fuck all—but also the hope that the staff and infrastructure can be used to launch something new. “I’m not going to be the guy who ruined About.com,” Vogel told Business Inside. “ It’s already ruined, so this is all upside here. ”
Humans discard a trillion single-use plastic bags every year. If you were a wax worm, this statistic would make you drool. The caterpillar loves to eat them. From Atlas Obscura : Frederica Bertocchini, a biologist at the Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology in Spain, noticed some wax worms had managed to eat their way through the plastic bags they were being kept in. While other organisms can take weeks or months to break down even the smallest amount of plastic, the wax worm can get through more—in a far shorter period of time. The researchers let 100 wax worms chow down on a plastic grocery bag, and after just 12 hours they’d eaten about 4 percent of the bag, according to findings published Monday in the journal Current Biology. That may not sound like much, but that’s a vast improvement over fungi, which weren’t able to break down a noticeable amount of polyethylene after six months. Image of wax worm: skeeze/Pixabay
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This worm eats plastic bags
Quelli che il Calcio (That which is Football) is one of Italy’s top sports broadcasts and it is played in the country’s prisons; it has a ticker that you can send SMSes to that then show up on screen. (more…)
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Mafia used the text-message ticker at the bottom of a sports broadcast to get messages to mob bosses
50 armed men in camou flak jackets driving armored cars cordoned off the roads leading to a transportation company’s office in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay (a “smugglers’ haven in the border region with Brazil and Argentina”), blew the entire face of the building up with demolition equipment, stole an estimated $40M and escaped by motorboat up the Panama River. (more…)
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In Paraguay, the "heist of the century" is blamed on a notorious Brazilian prison-gang