Month: March 2015

A new business article on “measuring innovation” notes that 50% of firms investing in R&D are not patenting the results of their research. The main thrust of the article is that, because so many firms are avoiding the patent system, that patents do not make sense as a broad measure of innovation. Their solution is to use the […]
via Patently-O » Patent
Measuring Innovation

There are plenty of DIY shed tutorials online, but what’s often lacking is how to properly construct the foundation to ensure it’s square, level, and less prone to rot. This videos shows you how to accomplish all three.

Take your time and don’t rush the construction of your shed. The easy way to check that your base 2×6’s are square is to measure corner to corner and adjust until the two measurements match. Use 1/2" plywood to temporarily lock in each corner after it’s square and use 4" deck screws with washers to attach the corner 2×6’s to each other.

Raising the platform off the ground will protect it from rotting, but it can be difficult to make it level. Use a bubble level and clamps to adjust the height. For a final check, place the level across the corner so it rests on opposing sides and then clamp it tight and attach your frame to the footing.

The best tip here is how to set the floor joists when you are by yourself. Use a clamp to attach a 2×4 to the underside of the frame and use that to rest your floor joist on as you position it into place and secure it.

This video has a lot of other tips including best practices for measuring joists and how to prevent critters from making a home underneath your shed or tiny house.

How to build a level shed platform | Jon Peters (YouTube)

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via Lifehacker
Build a Square and Level Platform for a Shed or Tiny House

Is cracking your knuckles dangerous? Is it really going to give you arthritis, or, like the rumor that gum will sit in your stomach for seven years, is this just another thing your mom made up to straighten out your bad habits?

For those who’ve made a lifelong habit of creaking and cracking their joints, fear not: The science is (mostly) on your side. That is, your knuckle cracking habit will probably do little more than irritate the hell out of the loved ones and co-workers who have to be around you all day.

But if you’re concerned, watch this video, which does a nice job breaking down the science of knuckle-cracking in less than two minutes. And if you still can’t make up your mind after that, well, you could always do as Donald Unger did, and crack only one hand for the rest of your life to see what happens. [Source: Vox]

Top image via Shutterstock

via Gizmodo
Knuckle Cracking is Probably Not Dangerous, Just Annoying

I was a happy child, but I didn’t have such a happy childhood. Other kids didn’t get my weird vibe, especially in elementary and middle school. And one year in particular, we moved to a new city and a new school, and things got ugly. Only one thing kept me from losing my shit: Star Blazers.

When I think back to that year of my life, Star Blazers is pretty much the main thing I remember, because most of the other memories are a blob of pure awful. Star Blazers was the Americanized version of Space Battleship Yamato, an anime series from the 1970s. These dubbed and heavily-edited versions of Yamato were airing pretty heavily in syndication in the 1980s, including every weekday afternoon on Channel 56 in Boston (also the home of the legendary Creature Double Feature.)

Every day when school ended, I would take off running. I was out of the chair before the bell even tapered off, and into the hallway. I ran like my life depended on it, because there were kids I wanted to avoid running into after school at all costs — but also, I knew if I made it home without being terrorized, I had Star Blazers to look forward to.

I don’t think a narrative had seized hold of my brain in the same way that Star Blazers did, before this point. It was the combination of high drama and aggressive serialization. The crew of the Yamato (or the Argo, in English) were constantly running from one terrible situation to the next, and their poor old ship was always pushed to its breaking point.

And nothing was ever fully resolved — every escape from danger was only a temporary reprieve. Situations carried over from episode to episode, unlike most U.S. TV of the 1980s and early 1990s, and as I shrank in my chair in the squirming overstuffed classrooms, half my brain was listening to the teacher while the other half was wondering just how the latest cliffhanger would be resolved. Plus the deadly threats to Earth only escalated over time, and the journey progressed — the first bunch of episodes deal with just leaving our solar system. There was even an episode-by-episode countdown of how long Earth had left to live.

In Star Blazers (and Yamato), some aliens called the Gamilons attack the Earth with deadly radiation. The whole planet will be dead in a year, unless a crew of humans travels to the distant planet Iscandar and obtains a cure. To this end, the humans refit an old sunken World War II battleship, using alien technology, and fly across the cosmos, fighting the Gamilons as they go.

And then, in the second season, the Earth is menaced by the evil Comet Empire, which really is a frickin comet piloted by evil, all-powerful aliens. In order to survive, the crew of the Yamato is forced to team up with their old nemesis, Gamilon leader Desslok (or Desslar, in Japanese.)

I’ll be real: the main thing I loved about Star Blazers was the ship. The characters were awesome, and I’ll get to them in a minute, but the Yamato (or the Argo, in English) was the star of the show for me. Way more than the Enterprise felt like the star of Star Trek. Much like the TARDIS on Doctor Who, this was a starship that felt incongruous — like it shouldn’t be spaceworthy, it shouldn’t even be out there at all, much less racing hundreds of light years across the universe. The very fact that we were depending on a World War II battleship in space just underscored how desperate the situation was.

And the Argo was the most long-suffering ship of all time. It was submerged in seas of acid. It was hit with mines. It sustained direct hits from missiles, lost one of its bridges, had its hull shredded, and had pieces flying off it all the time. The distress of the Argo, like that of its crew, felt like a physical thing: engines straining, hull bursting, lines streaking across the screen. The fact that it kept flying and outsmarting the vastly superior forces of the Gamilons and the Comet Empire seemed like a miracle borne of pure determination.

Survival, at all costs.

So I was at this new school, where I didn’t know anyone, and it was way bigger and more chaotic than any school I’d been to before. Budget cuts had just hit this particular school really hard, so classes were being combined, with 40 or 50 kids in a room with one teacher. This was the beginning of the gutting of public education, and you could feel the exhausted panic spreading among the teachers as they realized that teaching, as they had known it, was over.

This was the first school I’d ever been to where one kid beat up another kid in the classroom, as in one kid was on the ground and the other kid kept kicking, and the teacher just carried on talking as if she hadn’t noticed.

This particular school also had a weird system where kids were "streamed" into two tracks — one for academic high achievers, and one for less-advanced kids. Because I was new to the system and had a pretty severe learning disability, I was shunted into the track for slow kids. I was used to being on the receiving end of weird educational experiments, but this felt like some next-level shit, especially when combined with the budget cuts.

This was also the school where I had my first ever frenemy, who was named Courtney* and managed to make sucking up to me while also scheming to destroy me with the other unpopular kids seem somehow adorable. And then there were those other kids, the aforementioned ones who had me jumping out of my desk and sprinting out of school.

It was a combination of boredom and psychological terror the likes of which I’d never experienced, which is why I fell in love with the WAVE MOTION GUN.

So the Argo, or the Yamato in Japanese, was a refitted old battleship that had been equipped with an alien space drive, the tachyon-based Wave Motion Engine. And that’s what allows the Argo to go way faster than light and reach Iscandar in time to get the cure for the deadly radiation. But somehow, the Wave Motion Engine can also be turned into the most devastating weapon in creation, the Wave Motion Gun. It’s as if all of that frenzied forward motion, that velocity in spite of all obstacles, generates a built-up energy that can be unleashed in a pure white burst of power. But you don’t use the Wave Motion Gun unless it’s an absolute emergency (or the last five minutes of an episode, more likely.)

Also, this show is just jam-packed with space battles, including space dogfights and closeups of space cannons firing. In a decade when everything wanted to be the next Star Wars, it’s funny that a show that was made before Star Wars came along was one of the things that came closest to capturing that feeling.

All of Star Blazers seems to be on Youtube, more or less officially. And rewatching the show now, it’s clear that it’s a heavily bastardized and inferior version of the original Japanese show. The dubbing is fairly campy and some of the storylines are stuffed with cheese, but there’s also a surprising amount of scary darkness — like, the radiation-blasted surface of Earth in the early episodes, and the horrific Battle of Pluto. And the first episode of season two starts with images of the Comet Empire’s devastation, including actual nuclear bomb blasts and widespread death. The radiation sickness infecting Earth in the first season is also somewhat gruesome, and it’s easy to see where Japanese people were getting this imagery, a few decades after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But the show remains incredibly stirring and unironically heroic. The theme song has a men’s chorus booming lines like, "We’re off to outer space!" and "We must be strong and brave!"

And the crew of the Yamato is definitely strong and brave. Captain Avatar is a gruff old sailor whose hat covers half his face, and he sits in the command chair uttering words of wisdom… even though he’s dying. (And he actually dies, towards the end of the first season, after getting sicker and sicker.) His second in command, who has the awesome name of Derek Wildstar, is a brash rebel who blames Captain Avatar for the (presumed) death of his brother.

Years later, I lived in Japan and learned Japanese, and became pretty familiar with the concepts of "gambaru" (doing your best, no matter what) and "gaman suru" (remaining strong, in spite of all temptation and suffering). The characters on Star Blazers modeled those qualities for me, even with the sometimes awful dubbing — they seemed both stoic and passionate, and ready to beat the odds over and over.

I found Star Blazers at a time in my life when I felt as though nothing was real and I didn’t know who to trust, when not just the educational system but all the kids and adults around me seemed to be conducting inexplicable experiments. I was constantly scared and bored in equal measure. And in the middle of all this, Star Blazers felt undeniably, viscerally real.

The whole first season of Star Blazers is about the disintegrating old sea vessel rushing towards the floating, ethereal face of Queen Starsha. She’s waiting for them on her homeworld, with the cure for the radiation, and I remember her as kind of a saintly figure as well as a romantic interest for Derek Wildstar’s brother. I hadn’t really gotten a handle on gender, or sexuality, or anything else at that young age, but I understood that Princess Starsha was beautiful, and she was in some sense the antithesis of all the flaming death that’s being thrown at the Star Force every damn day. Queen Starsha is so beautiful, she doesn’t even have a body — she’s mostly just a face floating among the stars. Encouraging the crew of the Argo onwards.

I never even wondered about what was up with Queen Starsha — like, if she could send the Wave Motion Engine to Earth to allow humans to travel to her, why couldn’t she just send us the cure for the radiation? Why couldn’t she travel towards us and meet us half way with the cure? Maybe these questions were answered in the show, and I just missed them.

But that’s what I took away from Star Blazers, the show I ran to when I ran away from school every day. That sense of not just fleeing and enduring, so you can survive to flee and endure again tomorrow, but also running towards something. Hope, or your truer self, or just some illusion of a beautiful head out there in the middle of space somewhere. Beauty.

* Names have been changed, etc. etc.

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Contact the author at charliejane@io9.com.

via Gizmodo
Star Blazers Got Me Through The Shittiest Year Of My Childhood

There’s nothing like enjoying a family meal around a dinner table you built yourself. These plans for a farmhouse table date back to when actual farmers (not furniture makers) built their own furniture, which means you can too.

The beauty of rustic furniture is that it doesn’t have to be perfect. A nicked corner here or there won’t destroy the entire piece. To build this farmhouse table you just need construction lumber, which is available at any major home store or the lumber yard, a circular saw, chisel, pocket screw jig, and drill/driver. Yup, that’s it.

You can find the entire cut list and assembly instructions at Popular Mechanics below.

Build this Rustic Farmhouse Table | Popular Mechanics

via Lifehacker
Build a Farmhouse Dinner Table that’s Tough to Screw Up

Universities are still freaking out over the fact that some of their students are racists and assholes. But rather than deal with the inevitability that any decent-sized grouping of people will contain a percentage of both, they’ve opted to shoot the messenger: Yik Yak. Yik Yak provides a platform for anonymous postings that can only be seen by others within the same general location (1.5-10 miles). It also provides a voting system. With enough downvotes, a post is removed.

Despite these key ingredients, students and administrators are finding the app is to blame, rather than a portion of the people using it. So, they do ridiculous things like call for a ban of the app on campus — something almost completely unenforceable and ultimately futile.

In some cases, they opt for other unenforceable and futile efforts. The University of Rochester (NY) has discovered that local posts on Yik Yak contain a number of unsavory statements, including possible threats towards a student and racially-motivated activity. This has prompted a completely ridiculous response from the university’s legal team, which has "demanded" that Yik Yak do a number of things, including turn over a ton of information on users of the service.

UR senior counsel Richard S. Crummins last Thursday sent a letter to Yik Yak, a popular social networking app, making the demand for information, along with screenshots of the posts that UR wants to have identified…

Cummins’ [sic] letter demanded:

•Removal of certain offending posts that may remain on the Yik Yak application. And while there are apparently no such postings now on the site, this request would apply to any new ones concerning UR.

•The immediate disabling of the accounts of the users responsible for those posts.

•Any information in Yik Yak’s possession or control, including but not limited to names, email addresses, IP addresses, phone identifiers or other information that would help the university identify those users.

•Immediate and permanent removal of any and all use of the University of Rochester name from the Yik Yak application.

Yik Yak’s FAQ indicates that it won’t be doing anything Crummins has requested. It responds — like most online services — only to actual legal documents like court orders, subpoenas and warrants. What it doesn’t do (or at least is under no obligation to do) is delete posts, establish low-level prior restraint and divulge user information to PO’ed school administrators.

Sure, a lawyer may have written this, but it has no legal footing. Yik Yak could voluntarily do all of these things (or at least attempt to), but it is certainly not compelled to do so. Some of what’s being requested verges on the impossible — unless Yik Yak hires a team to police content solely for the University of Rochester, something it certainly won’t do because it would mean doing the same for every other offended entity that comes knocking.

And it should absolutely not turn over user information just because someone writes an angry letter. There are legal routes for this, and nearly all of them run through law enforcement. If the University of Rochester feels these threats are "legitimate" enough to engage its legal counsel in a round of pointless letter writing, why didn’t it skip this unnecessary step and just inform the authorities?

The answer to that question, it would appear, is wholly nonsensical:

[Dean of Students Matthew] Burns said that getting a court order requiring screenshots is a possibility, but UR’s focus is more one of trying to educate the campus community.

"What can we do as a community about this?" he said.

Doesn’t sound like much of a "community." It doesn’t even sound like "education." It sounds instead like administrators have already decided what’s best for the student body and that is asking a third party to turn over identifying data so it can move on with punishments for code of conduct violations. It doesn’t sound like the "student body" half of the community has been included in this discussion.

The university says it’s heard back from Yik Yak but has offered no further details than it’s "reviewing [Yik Yak’s] response." This sounds like it got a solid "no" from the service, but hope springs eternal in those who believe they’re right, even when attempting to skirt legal requirements.

UR officials say that the offensive and threatening statements on this social media app are no longer posted…

Which isn’t really a concession on Yik Yak’s part as much as it is the voting system. A couple of lines buried at the bottom of the story may explain the vanishing of offending posts, as well as point out something actually useful being done about the offending posts — something that doesn’t involve firing warning shots across the First Amendment’s bow or demanding third party services acquiesce to demands usually made by law enforcement and backed by court orders.

Burns also said that students have formed a group, Take Back Yik Yak, that is trying to combat all the negative comments on the site with positive ones.

Fighting negative speech with more speech: a far more productive — and RESPECTFUL — effort. Fighting speech with speech doesn’t seem to be on the list of the administration’s options, despite its assertions about "education" and "community." It would rather just shut things down, as is indicated by the dean’s "free speech, but…" statement.

Burns said that while UR is a strong believer in free speech, some of the postings constituted threats and were not protected speech.

I don’t think the administration is entirely clear on the extents of free speech. Sure, true threats aren’t protected by the First Amendment, but if the Yik Yak posts contained "true threats," then why wasn’t law enforcement (which could obtain the user information the school is asking for) involved? One explanation is that the "threats" aren’t nearly as threatening as the university is making them out to be. Of course, now that it’s run out of options, the university may approach law enforcement to take this further, but its efforts so far haven’t involved anything more than misguided actions and idiotic demand letters. The students are winning this one — both those trying to stem the tide of offensive speech and those behaving poorly — while the university tries to wrestle the ethereal into submission using nothing more powerful than legal department letterhead.

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via Techdirt.
With Absolutely No Legal Basis To Do So, University Counsel Demands Yik Yak Take Down Posts, Turn Over User Info

If you have a great idea for a new business and now you’re looking for funding or other support, you’ll probably have to break out the PowerPoint. There are only ten slides you should need for your pitch.

Well-known entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki emphasizes the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint to keep your presentation short and painless—ten slides, presented in twenty minutes, with thirty-point font.

His infographic also tells you which topics to cover, with the reminder that the point of the pitch is to stimulate interest for a second meeting for further discussion.

The Only 10 Slides You Need in a Pitch | Guy Kawasaki

via Lifehacker
The 10 Slides You Need to Pitch Your Business Idea

As I pointed out in Three Things Every Concealed Carrier Should Carry, a gun, a comfortable holster and a phone are the basic tools you need for daily concealed carry. Sort those out and you’re good to stow. As … Read More

The post Guns for Beginners: Three Must-Have Gunfighting Techniques appeared first on The Truth About Guns.

via The Truth About Guns
Guns for Beginners: Three Must-Have Gunfighting Techniques

Damn, that thing really is stealth. This video shows how the B-2 stealth bomber refuels and rotates its fuel receptacle so that it can maintain its stealth. You see the receptacle in clear view when it’s ready for fuel but after it’s all filled up, it’s gone and the whole plane is back to being undetected.

Must be so awesome to fly a stealth bomber, I mean, even getting gas is cool.

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via Gizmodo
Watch a B-2 bomber refuel and then make its fuel receptacle disappear