Bulky pasta types (such as farfalle and fusilli) require more packaging which means they are trickier to transport and lead to more waste (and boxes that seem to be half full of air). Scientists tackled the problem by designing flat pastas that can transform into 3D shapes when cooked. They do this by simply scoring the flat dough with specific grooved patterns, whose depth and spacing determine how the pasta will form when boiled. They can not only create classic pasta shapes (even spirals/etc), but new shapes as well.
They fed their data into computer models, which they hope will allow them to automate the technique and make it easier for food manufacturers to produce and deliver a loaded menu of morphing pastas.
Founded in 2016 by classical pianist Hunter Noack, IN A LANDSCAPE: Classical Music in the Wild is an outdoor concert series where America’s most stunning landscapes replace the traditional concert hall. He takes a 9-foot Steinway grand piano on a flatbed trailer to National Parks, urban greenspaces, working ranches, farms, and historical sites for classical music concerts that connect people with each landscape of Oregon.
To meet the acoustical challenges of performing in the wild, music is transmitted to concert-goers via wireless headphones. No longer confined to seats, you can explore the landscape, wander through secret glens, lie in sunny meadows, and roam old growth forests.
It’s a fantastic experience – so give it a shot if you have an opportunity to catch one of the remaining shows of the year.
Max has been slowly building a log cabin over the last few years in Karelia – a far northern territory adjacent to Finland. He has built a cabin, furniture, and even things like a water wheel to generate power, wash his clothes, and use as a lathe for making tools and other things he needs. He has good philosophical discussions on tool usage – and even crafts his own tools. Overall, it’s an excellent series of one man’s creativity and adventures in the wilderness – worth a watch for any DYI’ers to be inspired.
As others have pointed out, almost none of his techniques are really ‘new’, but that’s not the point. I have heard this also said about almost all creative endeavors: books, games, paintings, etc. It’s not the idea – it’s the artistry of the execution. Even seasoned entrepreneurs will tell you that ideas are cheap – it’s the execution that defines the success of the product. “There is nothing new – everyone has done everything at least once. What matters is how you present it.”
Besides watching his skills put to use to make amazing things, it’s most amazing to just sit and enjoy him presenting his thought processes and craftsmanship.
Ocado’s grocery warehouses in the UK don’t have people in them filling your orders. They consist of thousands of mechanical boxes that move all over the hive – a grid in which each box contains a specific product – and pick up your items and then deliver them to the shipping services at the edges. A grocery order can be filled in 5 hours.
They even have special robots for packing special situations since you don’t want to put a heavy item like a gallon of milk into the same bag as all your soft chips.
Honestly, this is almost certainly what we’ll be doing very soon; and in 10 years we won’t be making trips to the grocery store. Since COVID, many of us are already using automated checkout. in-store shoppers, and web order with pick up.
One of the use cases we talked about with autonomous cars was that they could drive themselves to the store, be loaded up, and then drive back to your place.
“Prisencolinensinainciusol” is a song composed by the Italian singer Adriano Celentano, released as a single in 1972.
The song is intended to sound to its Italian audience as if it is sung in English – English with a “Bob Dylan-esque” American accent. The lyrics, however, are deliberately unintelligible gibberish with the exception of the words “all right”. Celentano’s intention with the song was not to create a humorous novelty song but to explore communication barriers. “Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, because I like American slang—which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian—I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn’t mean anything.”
Here’s 2 more examples of what American English sounds like to foreigners.
This young lady from Willow Creative made an incredible mechanical mask that allows its wearer to control its mouth by moving their chin. The mechanism also moves its upper lip, nose and ears, and its eyes light up and move thanks to an Arduino Nano and a pair of mini servo motors.
I love movies. When I travel, I often see what movies were filmed at those places and visit the exact location of famous shots. I also love movie props and the interesting furniture and set pieces used to create the mood. Did you know others have the same enjoyment?
Here’s some resources if you’re interested in visiting your favorite movie locations and bits.
With bitcoin hitting all time highs and lows, it’s interesting to hear self-described pundits go on and on about the promises of crypto-currency. Surprisingly, one thing you don’t hear about is that the life of these currencies might be very limited now that quantum computers are becoming a reality.
Quantum computers are excellent at breaking mathematically difficult problems – which is the underlying technology for almost all of cryptography and block-chain algorithms. In October 2019, Google announced they have achieved quantum supremacy on a certain class of problems. So what does this mean for crypto-currencies?
Interestingly enough, the most vulnerable ones are the ones in the p2pk addresses. The coins in this address range were some of the earliest coins mined. The ones still in that range are largely considered to belong to people who have long since lost their keys. This means they could easily be mined by anyone with a sufficiently large quantum computer – and claim 2 million bitcoins worth almost 70 BILLION dollars (assuming bitcoin is worth the current market price of $35,000).
Not only that, if 25% of a currency is vulnerable to be quietly captured by a single investor with a quantum computer – it represents a tremendous amount of power to manipulate the currency.
So, unused p2pkh coins are safe, right? Not really. The moment you want to transfer coins from such a “safe” address, you reveal the public key, making the address vulnerable. From that moment until your transaction is “mined”, an attacker who possesses a quantum computer gets a window of opportunity to steal your coins. In such an attack, the adversary will first derive your private key from the public key and then initiate a competing transaction to their own address. They will try to get priority over the original transaction by offering a higher mining fee.
The time for mining a transaction is about 10 minutes, calculations show that a quantum computer would take about 30 minutes to break a Bitcoin key. So, as long as that is true, your bitcoin transaction is …probably… safe. But that won’t last forever. It is an almost certainty quantum computing will make crypto-currencies worthless at some point – maybe even in our lifetime at the rate quantum computing is making advances.
