20 Iconic Structures Demolished in Past 20 Years
Nothing lasts forever. The time comes for every building, whether it’s crumbling, outdated, or there’s just a new structure waiting to take its real estate.
Uh, Did Astronomers Just Discover Alien Megastructures Near a Distant Star?
Enter Jason Wright, the Penn State University astronomer suggesting the irregular reading might be a product of orbital megastructures, essentially massive alien satellites. Megastructures, Wright says, would be “very large” — and likely made of very thin materials to offset the constraints imposed by launching and controlling big objects. Wright suggestion was, in a sense, Occam’s Razor reasoning: Astronomical explanations couldn’t account for brightness dropping by a staggering 22 percent. To give a sense of just how extreme that number is, a planet the size of Jupiter would block about 1 percent of light — and planets don’t get much bigger than that.
Marc Andreessen proposes the IMG tag
I’d like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:
IMG
Required argument is SRC=”url”.
This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text at the point of the tag’s occurrence.
The return of the TV Antenna
The number of homes in the U.S. that get network TV over the air and don’t have cable or satellite service has gone up about 17 percent in the last five years, according to the media research company Nielsen.
Why ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ Sound So Similar in So Many Languages
The word for “mother” seems often either to be mama or have a nasal sound similar to m, like nana. The word for “father” seems often either to be papa or have a sound similar to p, like b, in it—such that you get something likebaba. The word for “dad” may also have either d or t, which is a variation on saying d, just as p is on b. People say mama or nana, and then papa, baba, dada, ortata, worldwide.
Behind the Failure of Leap Transit’s Gentrified Buses in San Francisco
Leap, which raised $2.5 million from some of the industry’s best-known investors, charged riders $6 to get across San Francisco, nearly three times the price of a city bus. Its primary draw was luxury. Each bus had a wood-trimmed interior outfitted with black leather seats, individual USB ports and Wi-Fi. The buses also offered a steady stream of gourmet snacks, sold via app.
Kitchen specs: sexist?
One of those engineers, Christine Frederick, studied women at work to create a chart pairing work-surface height with woman height; a 5-foot-6 women, for instance, would be most comfortable with her countertops and the bottom of her sink 31 inches from the floor. Correct heights, combined with efficient kitchen layouts, could make cooking slightly less of a burden, she wrote.
2015 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards
What constitutes a breakthrough? It’s more than just doing something no one else has done before. (If that were the case we’d have to honor anyone who has considered voting for Trump.) It’s doing something that no one else would think feasible. Like perfecting the robotic hand by building something that isn’t a hand at all. The people in the next twenty-one pages have propelled their industries—and our society—to new possibility. In ways that you may not immediately notice, they’ve improved your life. They’ve made Breakthroughs.
Abrams, Star Wars, Disney and Creative Control
In the middle of the interview, Glazer simply asked Abrams whether he had the last word on the edit of the 124-minute movie. Abrams confirmed that tidbit with a straightforward, “Yeah, yeah.” But then he went on to add, “But when you do a Disney project, there’s a clause in there that you kind of go, ‘Well, if I were a lawyer I could probably drive a truck through it…’”
Tesla with Autopilot release on October 15, 2015
The new ‘Autopilot’ features included in v7.0 are auto-steering, lane change activated by the turn signal and auto-parking in parallel spaces.
Some exciting news this week: Tesla Version 7 software with Autopilot goes to wide release on Thursday!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 11, 2015