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Archive for July, 2011
What the @#$% Is Up with Spidey’s New Suit
14
Jul
Jell-O Cartridges
14
Jul
The annual Jell-O Mold Competition was held in Brooklyn about a week ago, and the winning works are even more impressive than those from the 2010 competition. Take a look at amazing gelatinous versions of dentures, cups of espresso, a pancake breakfast, and more. Link -via New Jovian Thunderbolt | Photo: Francesca Signori
Beach House Q / Longhi Architects
14
Jul
© Juan Solano / CHOlon Photography
Architects: Longhi Architects / Luis Longhi
Location: Lima, Peru
Project Year: 2010
Project Area: 404 sqm
Photographs: Juan Solano / CHOlon Photography
Infinite rolling dunes from the desert to the East and rocky Pacific Ocean cliffs used by fishermen to the West converge on the site of Casa Q, creating a unique natural environment. Casa Q is the first residence built in one of the areas not yet occupied at the Beach Club Misterio, located 117 kilometers south of Lima, Peru.
© Juan Solano / CHOlon Photography
Challenging the stillness of the surroundings, Casa Q materializes the dreams of a young couple in a “floating volume†which embodies the spaces for a future family. The volume is supported by circular columns placed by intuition, as a dance, instead of forcibly in a grid. The dancing columns are accompanied by sliding glass panels that define the common area of the house; the living-dining and terrace are integrated or separated by the option to open or close the glass panels depending on social and weather conditions.
First Floor Plan
© Juan Solano / CHOlon Photography
The rest of the house – guest rooms, kitchen and services – are tastefully secluded at the back of the sloped site thus providing visual contrast with a volume of water in the front which has been unearthed for the enjoyment of swimming. Each view in the house connects to the infinite of the horizon.
© Juan Solano / CHOlon Photography
Beach House Q / Longhi Architects originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 14 Jul 2011.
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Lost Rainbow Toad Found After 87 Years
14
Jul
By Mark Brown, Wired UK
Herpetologists at Conservation International have rediscovered the exotic Sambas stream toad (aka Borneo rainbow toad, aka Ansonia latidisca) after 87 years of evasion, and released the first ever photographs of the brightly colored amphibian.
Indraneil Das of Universiti Malaysia Sarawak decided to hunt down the lost frog, and his team looked in the nearby area of Western Sarawak. In the summer of 2010 they made evening searches along the 1,329 meter high ridges of the Gunung Penrissen range to look for the toad.
After months of fruitless hunting, Das decided to include higher elevations in the team’s search. Then, one night, graduate student Pui Yong Min found the small toad two meters up a tree. Later they found another.
In the end the team had found three individuals of the missing toad species — an adult female, an adult male and a juvenile, ranging in size from 51 mm to 30 mm. All three toads exhibited those gangly limbs and the brightly colored patterns on their backs.
Talking about his team’s discovery in a press release, Das says, “They remind us that nature still holds precious secrets that we are still uncovering, which is why targeted protection and conservation is so important.â€
Robin Moore of Conservation International agrees, saying in the release, “it is good to know that nature can surprise us when we are close to giving up hope, especially amidst our planet’s escalating extinction crisis.â€
The slender-legged critter is only the second species on the “World’s Top 10 Most Wanted Lost Frogs†list to be found. In September 2010, the Rio Pescado Stubfoot Toad was rediscovered in Ecuador after 15 years of hiding. The spotty frog is sadly clinging on to survival.
The other frogs include the Costa Rican golden toad, the Australian gastric brooding frog, the Mesopotamia beaked toad from Colombia, Jackson’s climbing salamander, the African painted frog, the Venezuelan scarlet frog, the hula painted frog and the Turkestanian salamander — this hide and seek champion hasn’t been seen since 1909.
Image: Indraneil Das/Conservation International
Source: Wired.co.uk
See Also:
- Top 10 Most Wanted Lost Amphibian Species
- Native Toad Fights Back Against Yellow Crazy-Ant Invasion
- Biologists Mount Webby Amphibian Rescue Campaign
- 10 Critical Endangered-Species Battles
- New Species of Frogs Disappearing as Fast as They’re Found
- Top 10 New Species Discovered in 2010
Atheist Wins Right to Wear “Religious Pasta Strainer” in ID Photo
14
Jul
Austrian atheist Niko Alm supports the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a joke religion conjured up by atheists who say their make-believe stories are no better or worse than any traditional church's. In 2008, to make a point about his faith's sanctity compared to others, Alm asked to wear a pasta strainer on his head for his driver's license photo. Austrian citizens are only allowed to wear headgear in state IDs for religious purposes, so Alm, a Spaghetti Monster "pastafarian," argued that a colander is his "religious headgear."
This week, after avoiding Alm for three years and even making him submit to a psychiatric examination, the Austrian government caved. Alm now has a valid Austrian drivers license, complete with colander.
Score one for the freethinkers. Now who will be the first to try this on in America?
photo via Niko Alm and the BBC
Why Is Quantum Gravity So Hard? And Why Did Stalin Execute the Man Who Pioneered the Subject?
14
Jul
What is the hottest problem in fundamental physics today? Physics aficionados most probably would answer: quantum gravity. Of all the fundamental forces of nature, only gravity still stands outside the rubric of the quantum theory. The difficulty of quantizing gravity has led to radical theories such as string theory, with its bold predictions of higher space dimensions and parallel universes. It's unclear if these theories are "crazy enough to have a chance of being correct," as Niels Bohr used to say. And too few people know the dramatic early history of this field.
In fact, the field of quantum gravity was born in 1916, even before physicists had properly explained the other fundamental forces, electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. Twenty years later, a young Russian physicist by the name of Matvei Bronstein realized that gravity would be the hardest force of all to quantize. But before he could do something about that, he was swept up in Stalin’s Great Terror and executed at the age of 30.
[More]How much should you pay developers?
13
Jul
We’re at that time of year where we go through everybody’s salary and makes sure it’s reasonable. We’re up to about a dozen in-house software developers, and we’d been paying them based on a compensation system developed by our cousins at Fog Creek, which is different enough from Stack Exchange that there was some chafing.
So we sat down and thought out developer compensation from basic principles, and came up with what we feel is a pretty robust way to pay great people. Here were the core principles on which the system is built:
The development team at Stack Exchange is an amazing group of programmers who live up to our motto of “smart and get things done†every day.
We want to offer them compensation that is fair, easily understood, transparent, and competitive.
Fair means no games. Our compensation is not based on how well you negotiate or how often you ask for raises—it’s based on a repeatable predictable system. There’s no forced ranking, so other people don’t have to do badly for you to do well. We don’t have a range of possible salaries for every level, we have a single salary, so everything about the system is algorithmic.
Easily understood means that any developer can figure out what their salary should be according to this system. They can see what they need to do to move up in their career. And different managers can figure out how to pay their team members and get consistent and fair results.
Transparent reflects Stack Exchange’s core beliefs about running our business in the open, without secrets. It means that if a list of everyone’s salary suddenly appeared on Wikileaks, nobody would be surprised enough to be upset. Transparency is essential to insure fairness.
Competitive means that you’re earning at least as much at Stack Exchange as you would earn elsewhere. It’s critical to being able to attract and retain the kind of developers we want working for us. If our compensation system isn’t competitive, we won’t be able to hire the people we want without giving them an “exceptional†salary, and exceptions defeat fairness.
One important principle of Stack Exchange is that we do as much as we can publicly, and we try to leave public artifacts of all the work we do. In that spirit I’ve uploaded a complete copy of the current compensation plan so you can see what goes into compensation decisions at Stack Exchange. The only thing that is not public is the actual, final computation that determines each individual’s paycheck, because we have to balance our own philosophy of openness against the individual developer’s right to personal privacy.
Stack Exchange Developer Compensation (PDF)
Chinese Ghost Towns? Get Ready to Feel Good About Being American Again
13
Jul
There’s been this fear in recent years that the U.S. government is a completely mismanaged mess. To some extent, that fear is warranted. After all:
- Our budget deficit is over a trillion dollars.
- Our total debt is over $14 trillion dollars.
- Our political leaders would rather hold the line than look for real solutions.
- Our GDP growth is smaller than hoped for coming out of the recession, at 2%.
…we do have some very real problems.
As we’ve struggled there’s been a lot of mention about China’s economic vitality. China’s GDP growth has hovered around 10% for many years and sits at 9.1% in the latest data release. There is talk about all of the debt and how the Chinese should be seen as a real threat to surpass the U.S. as the world’s economic leader.
And that’s why the following video on ‘Chinese Ghost Towns’ so intriguing. It was from an Australian news outfit, SBS Dateline. You can find the rest of the story and aerial photos here.
It’s a little over 14 minutes long, but I think you’ll find it well worth the time.
It appears that a great deal of China’s economic growth has been through the strategy of the government building massive cities and universities that there is no demand for. All of the materials and labor that goes into these massive projects improves GDP. Unfortunately, its led to an estimated 64 million empty apartment units in China that are too expensive for most Chinese families to afford (there is only a little over 30 million multi-unit housing units in the U.S.). Occupancy rates in these new cities are at less than 25%. And the ‘world’s largest shopping mall’ is almost completely empty.
There is even an aerial photo of the Yunan University – built to accommodate 2.3 million students. How many students actually attend? 11,000.
All of this could ultimately result in a few little problems for China:
- Massive government debt to build and maintain all of this when there is no demand for it and then eventually tear a lot of it down.
- A housing bubble that will be so big it could potentially bring down the entire economy.
- Civil unrest for the wastefulness of taxpayer dollars to create housing that nobody can afford.
- Complete degradation of an already poor environment and habitat.
If this is what it takes to maintain economic growth… then China has some big problems. You get the feeling when watching this eery video that China’s government is completely mismanaged and it’s only a matter of time before that house of cards comes crashing down.
Chinese Ghost Towns? Get Ready to Feel Good About Being American Again is copyrighted by 20somethingfinance.com without consent to republish.
Are We In A Tech Bubble? Here’s The History [INFOGRAPHIC]
13
Jul
We’ve spent the past year wondering whether we’re currently in a tech bubble akin to the last decade’s dotcom boom.
Mashable has offered facts and opinions on both sides of the question. We’ve heard that the current boom is much different from the heyday of the late 1990s and that we have cause for confidence.
But we’ve also heard (from the likes of legendary investor Warren Buffet, no less) that the newest crop of tech darlings are highly overvalued at worst and unpredictable at best.
And we’ve even asked you, our readers, what you thought about current startup valuations and funding amounts. (Most of you responded that you were not optimistic about the future of the tech startup ecosystem.)
Now here are a few straightforward graphs and charts (created by KISSmetrics and FeeFighters) to help you get some better perspective on the issue. Clearly, the dotcom era was a different beast. But looking back on that insanity should help temper our excitement about new technologies with realistic revenue expectations.
Click image to see full-size version.
Top image courtesy of iStockphoto, patrickheagney
More About: bubble, investment, startups, tech bubble, technology
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