Slashdot Mirror

This approach might dramatically reduce animals' stress, if they can get milked immediately when needed. Relatedly, less stress means less cortisol, which means more nutritious, better-tasting meat. https://www.atlasobscura.com/a...

I don't see flying cars as feasible outside of autogyros. Autogyros have very short to no runways for taking off or landing like helicopter, and when losing power can glide down to a small patch safely. In that sense, it's beyond ideal for computerized control with no major infrastructure changes. It's also fuel efficient.

OTOH, it can't handle high speeds. Probably can go 150mph but not much faster. But since you can go straight lines with no slow downs, it should be ideal as regional buses. It would not be something to do cross country trips in.

1930s Autogyro Documentary

When the US Postal Service used autogyros.

Rotodyne, a british autogyro "bus" carrying over 50 passengers. Killed in prototype due to noise, otherwise exceeded all expectations afaik.

...Perhaps Russian government people...I smell Putin in these supposed "lone hacks".

I can only conclude that you listen to a lot of western propaganda; wherein everything you just can't wrap your head around means >Russia
The USA's own NSA has a long history of planting code , and at time hacking enemies and allies.

Also check out the Internet Archives headquarters in San Francisco, set up in an old Christian Scientist church. Another interesting (if a little weird -- each current and former IAer gets their own personalized, terracotta warrior-style figurine) unused religious building re-purposed as a data center (and tech headquarters in this case).

does it have beam sabres?

The downfall of Sears is a consequence of the migration of commerce from brick-and-mortar to online.

Which is pretty crazy considering they were the original mail order phenomenon. Sears' past is not a brick and mortar past. It was catalog orders and many of its customers never saw a store.

Nope. The original mail order phenomenon was Montgomery Ward, which predates Sears by some thirteen years, but the founder screwed up their lead during WWII. MW faded out just before internet shopping came along, so they never even faced the choice of whether to become an internet retailer. Right before they died I remember going into their store in Capitola, CA and seeing all the really fancy, expensive stuff that nobody was buying — like LaserDisc players, and the 3DO.

What these two companies' stories have in common, besides being early pioneers of mail order, is that they failed due to incompetence. Lampert was able to seize Sears because it was foundering. Montgomery Ward destroyed themselves with poor stock decisions. Instead of carrying what people wanted to buy, they carried what they wanted to sell.

Sears has the same problem, plus so many others. They basically depend on taking advantage of people who don't know any better, mostly old people who have been shopping at Sears for decades. They slap their name on other people's appliances and outdoor equipment, then provide inferior service of every kind on it. When the internet came along and you could not only find out what company actually made the stuff they sold, but what the original model number was, Sears' business model was obsoleted. You can buy the same clothes anywhere, and you can buy everything else somewhere else for less money and with a better experience.

1. Nice, if you're into mathematicians graves. I saw galileo's finger in Florence. Kind of macabre really. Someones grave isn't terribly interesting to me.
2. This is common almost everywhere. It's so common I see it in almost every touristy place more than say 100 years old.
3. Kinda cool, not really worth going to Pisa though.
4. This I don't understand. I"ve been to much of Italy,and Italians are generally quite friendly. Germans on the other hand...

Nakagin capsule tower:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/p...

Every apartment is just enough space for a bed, desk, shelves, shower, microwave cooker and shower/toilet cubicle. Some places may just have a communal shower/toilet and kitchen facilities. France has "studettes".

Taste is a perception, an experience involving food and a brain. It's not simply built into the food.

Well, your taste buds are in your tongue, which is where the receptors are which tell your brain what it's experiencing in terms of the salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami.

The chemicals that make up the food is actually intrinsic to the food itself, your brain isn't just saying "either liver or peppermint, can you give me a hint?".

For example, if you tell people that the same piece of meat is or isn't humanely farmed, it tastes different.

How that animal is killed has been proven to alter taste:

The scientific basis for the phenomenon is well-established, and it's frequently been discussed as a reason to make slaughterhouse practices more humane. The key ingredient here is lactic acid: in an unstressed animal, after death, muscle glycogen is converted into lactic acid, which helps keep meat tender, pink, and flavorful. Adrenaline released by stress before slaughter uses up glycogen, which means there's not enough lactic acid produced postmortem. This affects different kind of meat in different ways, but in general it'll be tough, tasteless, and high in pH, and will go bad quicker than unstressed meat. (Lactic acid helps slow the growth of spoilage bacteria.)

That humanely raised pig which could walk around, forage, be in clean conditions, and build up muscle tone and fat marbling over time with a more natural life and varied diet? It's going to be a superior product to an animal in filthy conditions which has been stressed and poorly treated.

Don't dismiss out of hand that the humanely raised animal tastes better, and I won't discount that what you cite is a real psychological effect where people believe it tastes better just because that's what they've been told.

I'm guessing you didn't read the article, and who could blame you? It's a long slog. But the problem presented in the summary, the implementation of Epic at a particularly hospital, is not really what the article is about or why the premise that "physicians hate computers" is posited.

It's that while the goal of technology in healthcare is to improve things, it very often gets in the way and slows things down, particularly for the clinician. Many physicians are frustrated to the point of burnout because the time required to see the same number of patients has increased dramatically, often taking much of their documentation work home with them. One physician noted (and found solace in the idea) that the software is meant to improve the experience for the patient, not the clinician.

The article is a good a read. I actually work in healthcare but I'm fairly removed from the clinical side of things, and rarely interact with physicians anymore. But I know exactly the pain many of these doctors feel because I see the absurdly inefficient way they have to operate.

I have my own pain to deal with when it comes to Epic. There has long been a standard in electronic health records known as HL7. It's an older, frankly outdated, position-specific method of moving health info around; but it does work. Epic went totally off the reservation and fails to follow much of the standard.

Epic isn't a 'normal' software company. They developed a system that different parts of a hospital (with different needs) could all feed into. It's complex, buggy, doesn't conform to establish norms or expectations, and takes a large staff just to keep afloat. However, they were the only company to attempt this level of hospital integration. So they took mountains of cash to DC, and used it to pay for lobbyists to push congress to require hospitals use this level of integration when putting an EMR system into place...an EMR system that only Epic provides. At least, that's the story.

That's why nearly every hospital that upgrades its EMR system uses Epic...they don't have much of a choice. It's also why Epic has a sprawling campus in Wisconsin that looks more like Disneyland, complete with a treehouse, a carousel and a giant dragon statue.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/p...

And even when we do learn our lesson from hard experience, latter generations ignore the perfectly unmistakable warnings their forefathers left behind. Apply this wisdom to current events as you see fit.

Second link:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/a...

oh ghod, let's not open THAT can of worms!

No, they exist in seawater but just in really dilute concentrations.

And that's not the only one. The is also the "Republic of Minerva".

Two key differences, it is not "beyond the influence of government regulation" since it is explicitly part of Frencb Polynesia which is in turn actually part of France. Some interesting points in the Wikipedia article about French Polynesia:

"Political life in French Polynesia has been marked by great instability since the mid-2000s"

Always a good sign... and

"Despite a local assembly and government, French Polynesia is not in a free association with France... As a French overseas collectivity, the local government has no competence in justice, university education, security and defense. Services in these areas are directly provided and administered by the Government of France, including the National Gendarmerie (which also polices rural and border areas in European France), and French military forces. The collectivity government retains control over primary and secondary education, health, town planning, and the environment. The highest representative of the State in the territory is the High Commissioner of the Republic in French Polynesia"

Overseas Collectivities are integral parts of France and the supreme local power is the French High Commissioner, and its ultimate head of state is President of France Emmanuel Macron.

So the notion that this little project will be "beyond the influence of government regulation" is delusional (or else pure hype).

But hey! It is being funded with an ICO! What could go wrong with that?

My projection: the only thing floating here will be the money people invest in the cryptocurrency which will float away.

In other news you can still send money to Mars One to see a colony be not built on Mars. Mars One really missed the boat (err... spaceship) in not creating the chance to invest in the new Martian cryptocurrency. But that may be coming if, their gullible (err... optimistic) contributors have dried up.

Fake. Look at the shadows in item 2. Not to mention where the snow ploughs would put the snow.

Not fake. These are photos of the Yuki-no-Otani Snow Canyon in northern Japan. Snowfall in the area is 1200-1500 inches annually. And they don't use snow plows, they use huge snow blowers. Here's an article about it, including a picture of one of the snow blowers in operation: https://www.atlasobscura.com/a....

Why did the government spend hundreds of BILLIONS on concrete pathways all across the fucking country? And hundreds of billions more to build the oil/gasoline infrastructure? My horse got along just fine without all that shit!

Speaking of horseshit... Cars and paved roads saved the world!

Not sure if there's a wiki, but I did stumble across this link which analyses the structure of some of the books published by ChooseCo. Apparently new editions (yes, they are still printing them) are including the maps that reveal a broad range of structures that range from quite simplistic to positively labyrinthine with numerous loops and jumps between branches.

Amen, brother, preach it! http://www.atlasobscura.com/pl...

In lieu of the obligatory posting of The Onion article "Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television", let me present this as an alternative :
I did this all while you were watching TV


But seriously, WTF do I need a separate APP to stream each goddamned channel?!!! The function is standard, the endpoint just changes.

Before you say that, you might want to read up on this--good coverage could be PDF of legal side and historical perspective.

It has been ringing continuously since 1840, and will probably continue for a long time.

Read all about it here: http://www.atlasobscura.com/pl...

I was surprised to learn that the Toba caldera was the most powerful volcanic outburst of the past 25 million years, packing more of a wallop than the Columbia River Basalt flows or any resurgent caldera, such as those associated with the Yellowstone hotspot. Seems like humans, acclimated to their native environment, are really resilient.

Yes. Back in the 70s you'd occasionally see them whimsically painted as robots or construction workers or whatever, but that was done by local residents. They put a stop to that for whatever reason and now they're all dark grey and silver. I don't know why. Hydrants in San Francisco are all white (except for this one.) The ones connected to cisterns instead of a water main used to have a different cap color but no longer.

A link to a very nice site about mud volcanoes: http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mud-volcanoes-of-azerbaijan

Nope, that's actually the "Gates of Hell" in Turkmenistan. http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-gates-of-hell

probably involves some kind of hokey religion that uses the mummies to legitimize the rule of the priest/king class

I see what you mean...

Atlas Obscura has lots of interesting places worldwide, but you can search by country etc. http://atlasobscura.com/globe/north-america/united-states I'd recommend visiting the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas http://www.atomictestingmuseum.org/ While in Vegas we meant to visit the Neon Museum, but never made it http://www.neonmuseum.org/ (Think it's also known as the Neon Boneyard) Other places I'd like to visit are the Sedan Crater, Nevada and the Trinity test site in New Mexico. Also, Griffiths Observatory in LA http://www.griffithobs.org/ which I think has a giant Tesla coil. California Academy of Sciences http://www.calacademy.org/ in SF appeals to me, after seeing it on the Discovery channel. Cheers, Phil UK

They should just get Disney to subsidize them & build a bunch of these:
http://atlasobscura.com/place/mickey-pylon