Weird News Stories part2

[Amentep]

Grrr...this line:

"Researchers at the University of Illinois analysed data on fatalities from every hurricane that made landfall in the United States from 1950 to 2012."

was followed by this line:

 

"Prior to the decision in the late 1970s to alternate male and female names, hurricanes were only given feminine names, a practice born out of the belief that storms, like women, were unpredictable."
 

This means that the data UI is looking at is skewed - by at least 20 years of data - to favor feminine storms doing more damage as from 1950 to sometime in the 1970s all storms held feminine names.  The idea of drawing a conclusion based on such flawed data is ridiculous.

Edited June 3, 2014 by Amentep

[Humanoid]

True, does seem a pretty big oversight. That said, the validity of the conclusion would depend on whether those pre-70s death figures are higher or lower than the average of the more recent data: the difference might end up skewing even higher.

[Gfted1]

Six governments tap Vodafone calls.

 

I. am. shocked. and. appalled.

[Raithe]

http://vimeo.com/97488887

 

 

September 21st 2013, International Peace Day, on the Normandy beaches at Arromanches.

 

Artists Jamie Wardley and Andy Moss include a team of international volunteers to help complete 9000 fallen figures, raked in the sand to create a massive monotone image. The Fallen are without nationality, without names. They represent a lost life, contextualising the 9000 daily mortalities during the Normandy beach landings in 1944.

 

A longer documentary is in production and this is an early teaser to commemorate 70 years since the Normandy beach landings of 1944.

Edited June 8, 2014 by Raithe

[Walsingham]

Sorry, Raithe. But while I may smile indulgently at people trying to paint Normandy as apolitical, I think it completely misses the point.

 

The war in Europe wasn't just another war. And the sacrifices made weren't apolitical. They were acutely political, and the men landing that day were acutely aware of that fact.

 

D-Day was a tipping point in history. One day. A handful of beaches and bridges. Most assaults hinged on the actions of only a few men. None of whom felt the way to influence history was an art installation.

[Gorgon]

If only it had happened earlier it would actually have mattered long term, not least for dozens of countries about to enter a virtual dark age of communist mismanagement. Did it shorten the war, certainly, but the eastern front had more or less broken the Wermacht by the time everything was ready. The Nazis weren't going to win either way. 

 

Imagine if Parl Harbor had never happened though, odds are good we would all be speaking russian. Well most of Europe anyway.

[Raithe]

Well I wasn't judging it as apolitical or political.

 

I was more interested in it as a way of getting people to wrap their mind around the number of dead rather then seeing it as simply a statistic.

[Hurlshort]

 

Imagine if Parl Harbor had never happened though, odds are good we would all be speaking russian. Well most of Europe anyway.

 

It's been awhile since I studied the subject, but if memory serves me correctly, the US getting involved was inevitable.  Pearl Harbor just accelerated it. 

[Gorgon]

Well the US was already supplying Britain but the anti war sentiment was still strong. The US could very well have been too late into it. Once Stalin turned the tide he posponed finishing off Germany for as long as he could while securing eastern europe under his control. If Normandy had happened even later he could have taken  Germany alone, and who knows what else. Normandy saved face by providing Stalin with the second front he had been promised for so long and gave the allies credibility, it was not the knockout punch, but the straw that broke the camel's back. 

[Hurlshort]

It's an interesting scenario, for sure, to think about how much land Russia would have ended up with if the Allies were slower.  I'd have to think that only so much would be ceded before it would become an openly hostile situation between Russia and the rest of the Allied forces.  It was already a very tenuous relationship.

[Raithe]

Tesla Motors release all their patents..

 

TeslaMotors - All Our Patents Belong To You

 

 

 

Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.

When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible.

 

At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.

At best, the large automakers are producing electric cars with limited range in limited volume. Some produce no zero emission cars at all.

 

Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.

 

We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. 

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.

 

 

[ShadySands]

and on that note

 

Tesla's Clever Patent Move Is Already Paying Off

 

Tesla may already be reaping the rewards of freeing up its patents.

 

Four days after CEO Elon Musk offered most of his company’s patents to rivals in hopes of cultivating a bigger electric car market, Nissan and BMW are “keen on talks” to cooperate on charging networks, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

 

That pretty much validates why the Silicon Valley company freed up its patents in the first place: Tesla wants its superchargers to become the industry standard.

 

That way, other companies will use and enlarge Tesla's existing network of 97 charging stations that currently dot a path across the continental United States, making it more and more feasible to swap fuel-burning cars for battery-electric ones, even for long-distance travel.

[Gfted1]

Hackers Reverse-Engineer NSA Spying Tools Using Snowden Leaks.

 

Oh irony, why you so delicious?

[Wrath of Dagon]

American exchange student removed from a marble vagina in Germany : http://www.news.com.au/world/us-exchange-student-pulled-from-tubingen-university-marble-vagina/story-fndir2ev-1226963283491

Nice going Germany

 

Now if they could just help Obama remove his head from his ass.

[Raithe]

Just for the historical interest..

 

io9 - Harappa: A Civilization Without War

 

 

 

The Harappan civilization dominated the Indus River valley beginning about five thousand years ago, its massive cities sprawling at the edges of rivers that still flow through Pakistan and India today. But its culture remains a mystery. Why did it leave behind no representations of great leaders, nor of warfare?

 

Archaeologists have long wondered whether the Harappan civilization could actually have thrived for roughly 2,000 years without any major wars or leadership cults. Obviously people had conflicts, sometimes with deadly results — graves reveal ample skull injuries caused by blows to the head. But there is no evidence that any Harappan city was ever burned, besieged by an army, or taken over by force from within. Sifting through the archaeological layers of these cities, scientists find no layers of ash that would suggest the city had been burned down, and no signs of mass destruction. There are no enormous caches of weapons, and not even any art representing warfare.

 

That would make the Harappan civilization an historical outlier in any era. But it's especially noteworthy at a time when neighboring civilizations in Mesopotamia were erecting massive war monuments, and using cuneiform writing on clay tablets to chronicle how their leaders slaughtered and enslaved thousands.

What exactly were the Harappans doing instead of focusing their energies on military conquest?

 

The Harappan People

The Indus River flows out of the Himalayas, bringing fresh water to the warm, dry valley where the ancient city of Harappa first began to grow. The Harappan civilization is the namesake of this city, located between two rivers, whose arts, written language, and science spread to several other large, riverside cities in the area. Mohengo-Daro was the largest of these cities with a population of roughly 80,000 people. Archaeologists have recently analyzed the teeth of people buried in Mohengo-Daro's graveyards, searching for telltale chemical traces that reveal what these people ate as children. They discovered that many had grown up eating food from elsewhere in the region, meaning that a lot of the city's inhabitants were migrants who had come to the city as adults.

 

Art from Harappan cities also attests to a very mixed population, with statues showing people who sport a wide variety of clothing and hair styles. So the Harappans appear to have been a very diverse lot. Some traveled far from their cities, probably by boat across the Persian Gulf, to trade with other great civilizations in the region during the 2000s BCE. There was at least one Harappan trade outpost in Mesopotamia, in the city of Eshnunna, which today lies about 30 km northeast of Baghdad. People from other Mesopotamian cities like Ur owned distinctively Harappan luxury goods such as beads and tiny carved bones.

 

Harappans appear to have been traders who welcomed people to their cities from pretty much anywhere. But that doesn't mean they were disorganized or anarchic.

Standard Measures and Writing

By studying the layers of built environments in Harappa, archaeologists have pieced together a fragmentary history of the civilization's rise. Harappa began as a village, probably about 6,000 years ago. There's evidence of agriculture and very early pottery throughout the 3000s BCE.

 

It's also during this time that we begin to see markings that look like writing on pottery. Over a period of just a couple of centuries, these crude marks evolved quickly into an alphabet that we still can't decipher. Here you can see a typical example of Harappan writing, on a seal that would have been pressed into soft clay, and was probably used in trade.

 

Indeed, it seems that writing in Harappa followed soon after the invention of standard weights and measures for commerce. Archaeologists have unearthed hundreds of blocks in a variety of standard sizes that conform to the binary weight system favored in the Indus Valley.

 

This fits with most accounts of how writing emerges in civilizations. Often, it begins with people using numbers and math to determine who owns what, or who has bought what from whom. From there, it develops quickly into a full-blown system of symbols. Writing seems to be one of those technological innovations that evolves very rapidly once people start using it.

 

Advanced Technologies and Civil Engineering

Harappans didn't just create standardized measures — they liked everything to be standardized, right down to the size of the bricks they used to build their homes. Bricks and boards, like weights, came in just a few standard sizes. Echoing this love of order, Harappans built their cities on fairly strict grids.

 

Above is a sketch of the city plan of Mohenjo-Daro, based on what we've been able to reconstruct from ruins. There are several wide promenades — large enough for two carts to drive side-by-side — that passed through the city, then out of the gates and into the farmlands beyond.

 

Though the idea of a street grid seems perfectly ordinary to city-dwellers today, it was unusual at the time. Most great cities in Mesopotamia, for example, had curving streets and a more organic-looking layout (you can see a nice reconstruction of Ur's city plan here [PDF]).

 

Sometimes archaeologists call the Harappan architectural style "nested" because they loved to build walls within walls. Every city was surrounded by a wall, but once inside, residents would find themselves walking past several more walled enclosures. We're not entirely sure why the Harappans designed their cities this way, but it's possible that these inner walls protected sacred areas or the estates of particularly high-status citizens.

 

I mentioned earlier that the Harappans left no monuments to their leaders, but their walls and city layouts make it clear that they were hardly egalitarians. Homes ranged from single rooms in dormitory-like buildings, possibly for slaves, to palatial estates with dozens of rooms and multiple outdoor courtyards. Harappans preferred two-story buildings, and semi-public courtyards were part of nearly every home.

 

 

 

 

And it does go quite a bit further on..  but I'll let those interested follow the actual link for the rest of it..

[samm]

Thousands of years without war, nor other remnants of violence, no leader cults? Hygiene, standardised measurements, trade, written language - there's a lot that's worse now than this culture from 6000 or so years ago  was  Thanks for sharing

Edited June 25, 2014 by samm

[Gfted1]

I wonder how they took "possible" slaves without warfare.

[Nonek]

One believes the people of Harappa, inspired by their great god king Parappa, solved most issues by singing and dancing like a rapper. I may be mistaken.

[Malcador]

I wonder how they took "possible" slaves without warfare.

 

Really deceptive job ads.

[JadedWolf]

Stray cat befriends lynx after sneaking into its zoo enclosure

 

 

http://metro.co.uk/2014/06/18/stray-cat-befriends-lynx-after-sneaking-into-its-zoo-enclosure-4766873/

Edited June 25, 2014 by JadedWolf

[Amentep]

I think I visited this town in a D&D session.

Edited June 25, 2014 by Amentep

[Hiro Protagonist]

This is cool, kind of. Now when going to the toilet, it doesn't necessarily go to waste.

 

Girls create a generator that runs on pee

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/african-girls-pee-powered-generator-raises-questions-f1C6956099

 

 

[Raithe]

UN Committee backs Argentina over the Falklands

 

 

A UN committee approved a new resolution calling on Britain and Argentina to negotiate a solution to their dispute over the Falkland Islands, essentially favouring Argentina's stance in the nearly 200-year-old feud.

 

The 24-nation Decolonisation Committee passed the resolution by consensus despite passionate speeches from a pair of Falkland Islands representatives arguing that most islanders want to keep things as they are.

 

The decision showed that the committee members have been largely unmoved by a referendum in the Falkland Islands last year in which more than 99% of voters favoured remaining a British Overseas Territory.

 

Britain has rebuffed Argentina's calls to negotiate the sovereignty of the wind-swept south Atlantic archipelago, saying it is up to the islands to decide.

Argentinian foreign minister Hector Timerman railed at Britain for ignoring dozens of UN resolutions urging the two countries to sit down and talk.

"It is imperative that the United Kingdom sits down again at the negotiating table," he said.

 

Britain asserted control of the islands by placing a naval garrison there in 1833. Argentina claims Britain stole the territory, and the two countries fought a brief war in 1982 after Argentina invaded the islands.

 

The Falkland Islands Government is a direct democracy and largely self-governing, although Britain handles its defence and foreign affairs.

Excluding the British military and civilian contractors, the territory has a population of about 2,563 people, according to a 2012 census.

Argentina argues that the Falkland Islands dispute is a matter of "sovereignty," while Britain prefers to refer to "self-determination," which focuses more on the people than on the territory.

 

Mr Timerman pressed Argentina's claims that islanders are an "implanted" population, kept stagnant with strict immigration policies for the purpose of occupying territory that does not belong to them.

 

Roger Edwards, a member of the Falklands Islands Legislative Assembly, said such claims are false.

He said he and many other islanders come from families who have been there for generations and "have a strong wish to be master of our own affairs".

Mr Edwards said: "We are confident in our future. The only inhibition to our development is the continuing spiteful aggression of our people by Argentina."

The British Mission to the UN criticised the committee for ignoring the outcome of last year's referendum.

 

"It is disappointing that once again the C24 has not respected the clear and democratic expression of the Falkland Islanders' wishes and continues to describe the Falkland Islands' constitutional relationship with the UK as a 'colonial situation,'" the mission said.

[ShadySands]

If you build it, they will come

 

Automatic Sperm Extractor Introduced Into A Chinese Hospital

 

A Chinese hospital in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu Province, has introduced a new machine that makes sperm donation even easier- an automatic sperm extractor. I’m all for hands-free technology, but have scientists gone a little too far with this invention?

 

The effortless machine features a massage pipe that can be adjusted to suit the height of the user. All the gentleman has to do is plug in the frequency, amplitude and temperature and off they go. It’s also fitted with a small screen for those feeling uninspired.

 

According to the director of the urology department of the hospital, the machine is designed to help individuals that are finding it difficult to retrieve sperm the old fashioned way. We're not entirely convinced that standing in a room shared by many other people and being milked like a cow is going to help, but their efforts are commendable. Here’s to technology.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3CWLCoQu7c

Edited June 28, 2014 by ShadySands

[IndiraLightfoot]

US Navy Harrier Pilot lands with no nose landing gear, placing the nose cone on a customized stool on the USS Bataan carrier. Crazy stuff!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D10-sn_LYbA