Godspeed Alfred Peet

One of the originators of the coffeehouse craze, and original supplier and mentor to Starbucks Coffee, Alfred Peet, of Peet's Coffee, died today at the fully roasted age of 87. I enjoyed sipping espressos and cappuccinos at the original shop in Berkeley. It was a nice walk uphill from my apartment, in a quiet neighborhood away from the usual bustle of Southside. Somehow, the coffee there tasted better than at any of the franchise locations. If you want to know how Peet's caramel macchiato is supposed to taste, next time you're in Berkeley, order a tall from the stand near the tennis courts.

Helmety Caffiend

As Chad Vader gets really into this "vlog" thing, he makes a couple of faux pas in his next "effort." First, recording from a work computer on his coffee break. Second, overdosing on three large cups of iced coffee. I never knew Chad talked with his hands so much. He looks like a top heavy muppet introducing the mystery guest.

"I normally don't drink coffee, because it is difficult to sip through my frontal breathing vent."

That's a lot of Triplets!

All I can say is, I'm glad my parents did not try for "one more."

CINCINNATI - Already the proud parents of triplets, Victoria and Tim Lasita had decided they wanted to have "one more."

"I guess we should have been more specific and said one more child, not one more set," said Victoria, 39, who delivered the couple's second set of triplets Wednesday after 34 weeks of pregnancy.

My brothers and I were already a surprise for our family, because they were expecting only one, and they found out there were three, only two days before we were born. Three was definitely enough.

Copper Thief Caught Fire

It seems that scrap metal thieves may need some sort of certification before attempting to strip abandoned buildings for copper:

Officers were alerted to the incident at the old H. Koch & Sons building in the 5400 block of East La Palma Avenue by someone in the vicinity. When they arrived, they found the man on the ground, afire.

That's what you get for cutting into a live wire without insulating yourself, not grounding the cable, or not even trying to shut off the power.

"Hypothetical" Gene Test Proves Twinship

A set of twins separated at birth by incompetent hospital staff are seeking compensation, but the hospital claims their genetic testing is only "hypothetical." No wonder an online game targeting corrupt officials has become so popular, its servers crashed. Administrative corruption in asian cultures isn't only about bribery, it's also about abuse of power, and not being held accountable for obvious wrongs.

Sprinkled With Awesomeness

Heh.

NOAA Didn't Get NASA's Memo

A report from some scientists at NOAA are blaming greenhouse gases for 2006 being the 2nd hottest year on record in America. Unfortunately, the letter is wrong before it's even published, because, according to NASA, 1934 is the hottest year on record, followed by 1998, 1921, and then 2006. 2006 was only the 4th hottest on record. The AP climate science fact checkers are up to their usual standards. Nevermind that the NOAA letter is based on GCM's trying to incorporate the El Niño effect, which has never been successfully managed to any "consensus" satisfaction. NOAA, of course, manages its temperature record differently than NASA, but has not made any corrections or statements regarding the other body's changes. So, we have two federally funded bodies with differing climate records. Consensus?

Once In A Red Moon

I've always hated that expression denoting rarity: "Only once in a blue moon." Red moons, which happen during lunar eclipses, are pretty rare too, and can actually happen. So, why is the moon red during a lunar eclipse instead of black or some other color? Because the sky is blue. Follow the link for a time lapse slideshow of today's lunar eclipse, and for the explanation of our atmosphere scattering blue light, but not scattering red light as much, so that the moon receives a little bit of red light as it passes through and hits the moon in our shadow. It's an extreme sunset!

Acer To Acquire Gateway

PC Magazine does a good job analysing Acer's move to buy out Gateway. Lance Ulanoff's main point is that the move is a good way for Acer to get into direct sales in America, since they missed that boat in the late 1990's.

Unintended Recyclable Consequences

Broward County in Florida is studying the idea of using recycled glass to mix in with sand to stop erosion. Trucking in sand is an expensive endeavor, and so far, the county officials have spent about 600,000 dollars studying whether the crushed glass idea is even feasible, and cheaper, than continuing with just plain old sand. One thing they know for sure, is that the glass bits do not erode at the same pace as the plain natural silica, which breaks down at a much faster rate. However, they don't know about the ocean's erosion patterns, whether dumping the crushed glass in one spot will actually stay there for a while. It would be a pretty expensive mistake to have the glass taken away by the ocean faster than regular sand. I am glad that the story mentions Florida's best cautionary tale for reuse: building artificial reefs of old tires, only to have the ocean currents blast them apart, and cost the state even more in cleaning up the environmental hazard.

Ouch!

David Gray / Reuters

Gunther Weidlinger of Austria had to be taken to the hospital after stumbling in the steeplechase at the World Championships in Osaka, Japan.

Update: There's YouTube video of the fall with German commentary. The video is actually worse looking than the picture above.

Vader Vlogs

Now that podcasts are officially dead, and people are now turning to vlogs, or video logs, (like how web logs turned into blogs), everyone and their brother is getting on YouTube. Well, maybe Darth Vader isn't on YouTube, but his little brother is. Thankfully, no cats.

"End transmission, heh heh heh, uh, bye."

Reading This

The last book.

Come back later.

Third Most Intense Hurricane in History

Dean is the third strongest hurricane ever recorded? Big deal. Still not the top dog. That's like some other Dean that was an also-ran and became a never-was. A lot of noise over a ranking that doesn't matter.


YEEEARGH!

Great Neuroscience Story

And it's in the Los Angeles Times! It's the story of Gary Lynch's study of ampakines, how they affect long-term pontentiation, and his hope that LTP was the underlying process of memory. Mix in a new staining technique to actually visualize a "trace" of a memory, the egos involved in paper publishing and attending conferences, and even shorting the stocks of competitors' biotech companies out of spite, and this story is also a great examination of the lives surrounding scientific work in microbiology. Fascinating. Read all of it.

The Source of Coffee Bitterness

Chlorogenic acid lactones and phenylindanes. These are antioxidants created in coffee beans during the roasting process. The darker the roast, the more lactones and phenylindanes are present in the bean. The chemistry team who found these antioxidants is now working on a way to mitigate the reactions which cause them during the processing of the raw beans. Less bitter brew? Sign me up!

It's Breakfast...

...on a stick. Or is that "on a steeeek?"

"Oh yeah? Well, your mother's a corndog!"

Pirate Nabbing Dogs Honored

In a followup to the pirated disk smelling dogs in Malaysia, who were so good at their jobs, that the pirates even placed bounties on their heads, they have recently been honored for helping take down knock-offs valued at over 6 million dollars.

REUTERS/Bazuki Muhammad (MALAYSIA)

The prized pooches, Lucky and Flo, got medals, their paw prints were captured for posterity, and they will soon be embarking on a world tour so film companies can thank them properly. No word if they got extra treats or even a big milk bone.

The Next Salvo In The HD Format Wars

Both Blu-Ray and HD DVD came out last year, with Sony making Blu-Ray, and Toshiba making HD DVD. Blu-Ray disks have been outselling HD DVD's by about two to one, mainly because of Sony's aggressive marketing and licensing with most major U.S. movie studios. Perhaps they learned their lesson from the Beta and VHS wars in the 1980's. The format war even extends to game consoles, with Sony's PS3, naturally, going with the Blu-Ray format, and Microsoft's XBox 360 siding with Toshiba. Apparently, playing HD DVD's on the XBox 360 has not yet made a dent into Sony's Blu-Ray sales, considering how badly PS3's are selling. But HD DVD took the next step this week, signing Paramount and Dreamworks Animation to exclusive format rights. Will Sony learn from its past mistakes, and court the porn industry, like VHS did? Or do both Sony and Toshiba see the writing on the wall, and are not even bothering?

Helmety Chocolate Rain

A new internet "star" surfaced over the last couple of weeks, reaching almost 6 million views for his video on YouTube, joining the ranks of the Numa Numa sensation. What the hell am I talking about? This guy, Tay Zonday, singing his song Chocolate Rain. When you have everyone and their brother doing spoofs of this video, even doing its opposite, Vanilla Snow, well, even the true internet stars have to respond. Now Tay may be the black answer to Rick Astley, but we've got other YouTube characters with deep voices to choose from.

"To get me out they had to use a crane."

Update: Tay Zandog shot past 6 million views between last night and right now. Looks like he's still got about 5 minutes left in his 15 minutes of fame.

Anti-Bacterial Soap Useless, Even Harmful

Comprehensive analysis has shown that regular soap removes germs from hands just as effectively as anti-bacterial soap. The concentrations of the active ingredient, triclosan, in over the counter soap is much lower than the levels used in hospitals. However, the levels in commercial soap is still enough to cause random mutations, possibly leading to more drug-resistant bacteria. At least hand sanitizers use alcohol which kills indiscriminately, not causing any mutations, but they build a population of germaphobic people with weak immune systems.

Metal Theft Intersects Asian Knockoffs

Thieves hoping to get a whole bunch of copper from a bronze statues will have a hard time after officials from the non-profit organization who bought the statues found out they were cheap Thai knock-offs made of "pot" metal. The Opportunity Village may have a harder time replacing the statues since those 8,000 dollar statues only cost 500 dollars to make. Thankfully, the forgers in Thailand have been shut down.

Afternoon Hill Climb

That's the top of Lida St, above the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Not much smog today, actually.

Strange Choice For LA Times Comics

Get Fuzzy not only has some geek factor to appeal to those living in the information age, but the steward of the animals in the strip (can't really call him an owner...) has some pretty green animal rights views which Satchel the dog emotionally follows, and Bucky Katt foils psychotically. Pretty good hook. I like the Dungeons and Dragons references, but I'm not so enthusiastic about the vegan topics, which is fine, because Bucky will inevitably skewer them in his self-centered way. That's why I'm a bit surprised about the LA Times' decision to replace today's comic (below) with one from two years ago.

This was published today in the comics section:

Satchel says: "Headsets are a great way to prevent harmful radiation from messing up your head."

Bucky says: "...just don't go and put the cell phone in your lap, idiot. Whole other problem there."

Of course, cell phone radiation as a health hazard is an urban myth, unless you believe letters from British doctors published in medical journals based on a study of two or three people. The vegan story line for this week seems quite in line with most of the editorial positions for the Times, so maybe this was just a clerical error, since the dates are both for 8/15. Still, it's odd.

Must Be August

So, it's a really slow news day. Sure, some people might think that Karl Rove resigning is interesting, but meh, it's been six years in the White House, time to move on. Besides, he lost his veneer of evil maniacal genius when the Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress. Others are still flogging NASA for quietly "patching" their GISS data, and some old lady died in Japan. To liven things up, we need a late summer cookout. And who better to cook up a little trouble, than the Ninja? Pay special attention to his recipe for disaster, because the secret is adding trouble and miscommunication at the same time.

"Now you just sit back with a nice glass of chilled Rosé, and listen to the bearded man cackle."

Quick Reads

While I'm avoiding writing on the impact of the GISS adjusting downward all of America's temperatures after 2000, so much so that 1998, the year that morally justified signing on to the Kyoto Protocols, since it was the hottest year on record, has been bumped down to second after 1934, and all the other "hottest years" since 1998 have dropped out of the top ten, except for 2006, making all surface temperature records worldwide suspect. Because if even America can't get its temperature record correct, how can the whole continent of Africa, and big swathes of central Eurasia hope to? The conservative blogospere is running like they stole something with this story, meanwhile it just proves to me that we are still very much in the data collection phase of climate science, so any modeling that's used to play around with our theories is pretty much servers spinning their hard drives for no good reason.

Anyway, read this. As Zimbabwe has totally fried its agricultural, monetary, transportation, and energy infrastructure, it now sets its sight on dismantling its telecommunications. The fascist policy that all business in Mugabe's crazy house have to be majority owned by Zimbabwe citizens will effectively destroy the largest mobile communications company, which has been trying to get local entities in as majority shareholders for 10 years. The problem: they can't afford it. And with infinite inflation in place, they're not likely to any time soon. When the license is rescinded, the Egyptian owned company will have to stop operation, and we will see the implosion of services like we did when white owners were forcibly removed from their farms. It is not any wonder that the 40 percent indigenous owner can't get any more foreign currency to buy up the remaining 11 percent it needs to keep Telecel Zimbabwe running. The entire country of Zimbabwe is a bad investment.

This story has been getting a lot of play over the weekend as well: Teenage girl overdoses on caffeine from drinking coffee. The trouble with caffeine overdose story is that it took place in England, so I'm very sure laws will be enacted to put cameras in coffeehouses to make sure people don't drink seven double espressos in a row. Just for good measure, they'll put speakers on the cameras so a surveillance operator can yell at the patrons like they do for people urinating on the sides of government buildings.

And finally, Tailwind Sports, the American cycling team formerly sponsored by US Postal and currently Discovery Channel, decided to disband after the 2007 season because the current climate of international cycling makes taking a main sponsor's money a bad investment. Pat McQuaid, the head of the International Cyclists' Union, doesn't blame the American team for pulling out of cycling, especially when you have race organizers making entire teams pull out of their race midway through when one guy tests positive for doping, or telling your team that you can't have one guy on your team race, or broadcasters even pulling television coverage during the world's largest race. Sponsorship is based on seeing the company logo on a guy's jersey on millions of television screens, and if a team can't even guarantee that they can race in one city, or that TV will cover it, or even that national teams will race the Tour de France instead of your team, it does appear that advertising dollars are a bit iffy for spending on a cycling team. McQuaid does add that French race organizers hated Armstrong, so that may have added to his decision as one of the principals in Tailwind Sports to pull the plug on the operation.

A Man's Gotta Eat

Especially after a bike ride, a man can justify eating anything from the local greasy spoon. I had a side order of fried zucchini with my turkey burger. Vegetables count as health food, right?

My family's been getting sandwiches here since the 70's.

Sometimes Greasy Gears...

...Leave greasy stains. Also, if you saw yesterday's cycling video, this picture pretty much answers the top-most question in your mind.

Big Bugs Need To Breathe

After my bike buddy and I noted the striking similarity between our praying bike rack supervisor and the big bug from Men in Black, I was happy to find this post from Science Blog. It has long been theorized that the age of the giant bugs in our fossil record correlated quite nicely with the sediment record for oxygen concentration in our atmosphere. The more oxygen there is, the bigger the bug can get. After an ecological upheaval, the oxygen levels went down, and now we have regular sized land based arthropods. So can we really test that oxygen levels were the basis for big bugs? Using x-ray techniques to examine the tracheal passages of several species, we see pretty good evidence that oxygen is the key. Huge beetles have more airways in their bodies than smaller insects, especially in their legs. Using calculations to see how big a predicted beetle could get, testing whether airways were more important if they were connected to the head, or if the limbs were better, the team at Argonne National Laboratory found their predictions for maximum beetle size matched fairly well with the largest known species. So, now we know, the big bug wearing the Edgar suit has a lot of tracheal tubes in his legs, and probably evolved on a high oxygen atmosphere planet. I'd still say my prayers if I ran into it though.

Just Going For A Short Ride

No need for prayers, little out of focus mantis. I don't crash that often. Seriously, this little guy was very curious about how to put a bike on a car rack. Even made sure it was safe for a little while, before flying off.

Helmety Smoothness?

Okay, okay. I'll admit, the video for today does not exactly fit the definition of helmety goodness. But, it does concern cycling, and good cycling involves helmets. Besides that, we get to discuss the question most people ask about pro cyclists: why do they shave their legs? The video below answers one part of it, that road rash heals faster without hair getting in the way. But the other part is that it's easier on the masseurs as they work on getting that lactic acid buildup out of cyclists' leg muscles. So, what kind of anime style reactions would a Japanese kid have on seeing a couple of guys shaving their legs for the first time? Oh yes, he had to go there...

"It'll grow back in no time."

Cycling Anime!

The Japanese treat high school comedy cartoons a little differently than Americans do. It's not just enough to have kids falling in and out of love with each other, they have to have some kind of story. Like having the kendo club battle it out with the taekwondo club. Or play tennis with super ki powerups and techniques. Or make a Shimano Durace commercial into a story about a clumsy artist with a crush on the cutest girl in school. What? You hadn't heard about that last one? I just found out. They're already on the 18th episode of a summer season anime called Over Drive. Um, I'm going to go check it out right now...

Germans Keep Overreacting To Doping Rumors

The organizers of the Pro-Tour Cyclassics in Hamburg don't even care if Alberto Contador, the Tour de France winner, is racing or not, but have pre-emptively listed the guys they don't even want in their city because of doping implications. Doping implication, not doping violations. Because Contador was initially identified as the person referred to as "AC" in some stolen Operacion Puerto documents, even after being cleared by Spanish authorities, that's enough for Hamburg to say "nein" to his participation. The Hamburg organizers have also warned Michael Rasmussen and Alessandro Petacchi to stay away, although Petacchi has been cleared of doping for taking his asthma medicine, and Rasmussen has only the black cloud of missing surprise doping tests and lying to his team about his whereabouts. Of course, Rasmussen's case is much worse than Contador's and Petacchi's because he was fired over those lies, and dismissed from the Tour after it was clear he was going to win. German broadcasts of the Tour were abandoned after Patrik Sinkewitz of T-Mobile tested positive for exogenous testosterone, leaving it to a cable channel to pick up the program a day later. Sinkewitz later admitted to applying a testosterone patch for recovery during a training ride, and is taking his punishment, likely a suspension of two years.

I'm not sure what the German mood is concerning cycling, but the media is apparently sick of covering doping scandals. However, race organizers are handicapping their events by disinviting riders before they even commit to their participation. Fans want to see the big names and winners, and if the event does not have that extra celebrity appeal, attendance and interest will fade. Even with the doping coverage, ratings for Versus were up over last year, and French organizers said that road side attendance was up as well. People want to see the spectacle of it all. Being a whiny pouter because Jan Ullrich broke your heart, even though he has not been convicted of anything yet, will not make your race better.

To Build A Better Cooking Stove

In a story that brings in all the trendy narratives of the day, a physicist who has designed a more efficient wood-burning stove to help the starving in Darfur, we also read references to climate change, micro-loans, foreign aid corruption, and even metal theft. The stoves could be stolen before they even reach the Darfur residents because the steel in the stoves is more profitable as scrap metal than the cooking implement. Of course, talking about the 70 year history of Lawrence National Laboratories at Berkeley, the reporter doesn't mention that one of its first tasks was to refine the radioactive material necessary for atomic bombs. There's a 100 ton magnet up there that newer accelerators have been built around because they can't move it. But I guess mentioning the atom bomb history, especially during the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, doesn't fit in too well with the touchy-feely international narrative.

Brainy Baby Videos Worse Than American Idol

A new study has shown that video series meant to jumpstart babies' cognitive development actually makes them dumber. The metric for development was vocabulary, and the babies shown either the Brainy Baby or Baby Einstein video series knew fewer words than babies who did not watch the videos. Mind you, the videos are meant for children 8 months to 16 months, while the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no television at all for children under 24 months of age. Toddlers whose parents read to them during this time had the largest vocabularies. This study really helps bolster the notion that cognitive development in people happens in stages, and that the teaching process, especially what should be taught and how, needs to take these stages into account. As for the American Idol reference:

"I would rather babies watch 'American Idol' than these videos," [Dr. Dimitri] Christakis said, explaining that there is at least a chance their parents would watch with them — which does have developmental benefits.

The source of those developmental benefits? Parents spending time with their children.

Caffeine Protects Memory in Seniors

According to a new study, if you're over the age of 65, and you drink 3 or more cups of coffee a day, your memory holds up better than if you drink less caffeine or none at all. Here's the kicker: it's true only for women. So, if you're a retired man, and don't want to be nagged and reminded about stuff you're already forgetting to do, I guess you should ask your wife to cut down on the java.

Hello Shame

Thailand, known for its eccentric sentencing practices, such as caning a person's legs for vandalism, has instituted a new "shameful" punishment for cops caught for minor infractions: wearing Hello Kitty armbands inside the police station. Unfortunately, the cute armbands are not worn in public.

Not nearly as shame producing, would be the gifting of a pure platinum figurine. It comes with changeable gem-encrusted bows for the low low price of $163,000. That's a lot of cute for your buck!

Now how do I attach this thing to my $1.3 million cell phone?

Mathematician: Climate Models May Never Predict Accurately

In a great science story looking at the guts of most climate models in use today, James McWilliams, an Applied Math and Earth Sciences professor at UCLA, says that the models do not agree with one another in how the Earth's climate will change, and that they probably never will. The problem with the complex mathematical models is not even an initial values issue, which is already an established stumbling block with most models. McWilliams adds another problem he finds in the models: structural instability. Each model has a different set of approximations and calculations for how they handle physical effects. It's these approximations and calculations that scientists take to mean "theory." Each GCM in use today is a set of theories to be tested, and each one also has a different set of initial conditions, also based on theory, which the modelers plug in. Then they change a variable, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to double in 50 years or whatever, and let the models crunch away.

What's great about the Science News article is that McWilliams does not present his findings as fact, but also a theory that needs to be tested. However, his theory is showing a strong evidence that climate models do exhibit structural instability. He goes on to say that the underlying theory that the models are based on, increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will produce future warming, is sound science. Whether anthropogenic carbon dioxide is causing the present warming, or even whether the doubling of carbon dioxide levels from 1990 is a useful metric, these are things still being debated. None of this matters to McWilliams though.

McWilliams says the modeling community needs to grapple with this issue now to make sure that models are capable of providing answers to the kinds of questions being asked of them. He compares his argument with Kurt Gödel's proof that some mathematical statements are neither provably true nor provably false. Gödel's theorem, says McWilliams, "is understood as a strong cautionary result about making sure that you're asking the right questions before you exhaust yourself trying to answer them."

I like how mathematicians are lazy, some call it efficient, in tackling a problem: they like to know if they can solve it first.

Via GeekPress, who asks the proper follow-up question: should major public policy decisions be based on these models that cannot be proven to be valid?

First Things First

*Sip*

Enter The Dragon?

Heh. After 29 miles, more like Exit the Dragon. Also, the post ride hair is awesomeness itself!

Zimbabwe Continues Slouch Towards Pariah State

After forcibly seizing farms from white owners, causing massive food shortages, undervaluing their currency by not realistically reporting skyrocketing inflation, and imposing price controls, now Zimbabwe has passed a law mandating that communications businesses, including postal services, must make sure that "systems are technically capable of supporting lawful interceptions at all times". Some may argue that the monitoring of communications is similar to the Patriot Act in the United States, but that law was passed to ensure timely interception of messages during war time, which America already possesses the capability of monitoring. In Zimbabwe's case, its recent economic troubles are of their dictator Mugabe's own creation, and forcing businesses to submit to monitoring services' technical incapabilities is the pure stifling of the human right of free expression. Totalitarian states usually use the canard of "crime prevention and national security" to enhance their ability to find and remove voices of dissent, so Mugabe's actions are no surprise, especially when the state is beginning to expect an opposition coalition to emerge and advocate for the oppressive regime's removal. Mugabe blames Western sanctions for their economic turmoil, when it was the total collapse of infrastructure during the forced seizure of white-owned businesses that was the real origin. Passing this new law will do nothing to remove those sanctions either.

Helmety Timelessness

Far be it from me to criticize stagecraft handling the deep philosophical notions regarding time, but to create a skit to explain how a bomb mixed in with a weather machine can destroy the present, well, that's just brilliant. The Red vs. Blue Players also came up with a great device to explain the transition from the Halo engine to the Halo 2 engine. Blasting your whole story 1000 years into the future is not a bad way to do it. It's writing like this that makes me hope Red vs. Blue isn't really stopping at 100 episodes, since the Halo 3 game is coming out very soon.

"We're in the future! Things are very shiny here!"

Japanese Media Wrong in Going After YouTube

Japanese media companies are still complaining to YouTube, especially regarding its Japanese language version, on all the copyrighted shows that show up posted by YouTube users. The Japanese companies claim Google is taking too long in developing video recognition software to find "digital fingerprints" that the copyright holders can provide, and that they want YouTube to "reset" the site. I take it to mean by "reset" they want all videos deleted. However, when it's so easy to digitially record a broadcast, and then convert the movie file to all sorts of different formats (AVI, WMV, MKV, MP4, MPEG, MOV, M4V, etc.), the task of preserving the "digital fingerprint" becomes quite a challenge. Plus, the ease of editing the video may alter any kind of code that's included in the fingerprint.

While the idea of controlling your intellectual property is still one that needs to be protected, broadcasters of mass media may have to rethink, and be honest, about what they're actually protecting. They paid some governing body a lot of money for broadcasting permits and licenses. They wish to recoup those fees, and make profit, through advertising. I really believe it's time to do away with the idea of separate commercials, and have brand logos embedded on the broadcasts, to show who is sponsoring that block of time on the show. Of course, video editing can also cut these logos out of the video file, but new ways of including these images on screen may make the editing time-consuming and work-intensive. Obviously, a shift in how advertising is handled for broadcasts is necessary, and we do not yet know what that may entail. But asking for a website to "reset" itself is stupid in the extreme.

Beer in Space

Harder to make and serve than you would think:

Beyond the challenge of producing beer in space is the problem of serving it, says Jonathan Clark, a former flight surgeon and now the space medicine liaison for the National Space Biomedical Research Institute in Houston, Texas, US.
Without gravity, bubbles don't rise, so "obviously the foam isn't going to come to a head", Clark told New Scientist.
The answer, Dutch researchers suggested in 2000, is to store beer in a flexible membrane inside a barrel. Air can be pumped between the barrel and the membrane, forcing the beer out of a tap. Astronauts could then use straws to suck up blobs of beer.

The last time I sucked beer through a straw was while nursing some facial scratches after a fun bout of rollerblading. I didn't need a second Guinness for quite a while...

via GeekPress

Safety First...

...sanity last.