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For their scene in the feature-length Robocop remake, Ghostlight built this fantastic replica of the villanous, but flawed ED-209 robot from the original Robocop. But instead of just being a static mockup or a scale model, this one is full size, and can be walked in by a puppeteer.
The post Working Robocop ED-209 Costume appeared first on The Awesomer.
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Hoshino
Shark Cage Mishap
Can Paper Cut Wood?
Han Solo in Carbonite Fridge
The U.S. Army announced at SHOT Show that the Sign Sauer P320 MHS edition (a version of the P320 with a thumb-safety and threaded barrel) has been selected as the service’s winner of the Modular Handgun System (MHS) contract, replacing Beretta’s iconic M9 after 30+ years of service. Both compact and full-size frames will be used with the system, depending on the mission profile/duties of the soldier in question.
The 320 MHS will enter service as the M17, and while the caliber has not officially been named, it is thought that the Army with remain with 9mm NATO caliber, but with enhanced ammunition.
The post The Army’s New $580 MILLION Handgun: The Sig Sauer M17 appeared first on Bearing Arms.
via Bearing Arms
The Army’s New $580 MILLION Handgun: The Sig Sauer M17
It seems early to think about taxes, but the beginning of the year is the best time to get started. April creeps up quickly, after all, and you want to be prepared. Rockstar Finance suggests a few simple tasks to get the ball rolling.
You can start organizing your tax paperwork with this three-folder system, and beyond that, money blog Rockstar Finance recommends a few specific steps you should take right now to prepare for April:
- Find all your w-2s and 1099s
- Download statements for your student loans
- Download statements from your investments/real estate
- Find all those boxes of receipts
- Start typing stuff into your software
- Pick up the phone and call your accountant
You don’t have to wait until April, either. In addition to gathering your paperwork now, you can also just file now. Be aware that your refund might be a bit delayed if you claim certain credits, though. For more tax prep tips, head to the full post at the link below.
Photo by Pixabay.
Money Challenge #7: Start on Your (oh-so-fun) Taxes | Rockstar Finance
Warped Perception built a custom transparent acrylic head for a four-stroke engine so we can see what internal combustion looks like as it happens. He fed the engine with different types of fuel then captured the results in slow-motion. Amazing stuff.
How much traction? What’s the market size? Who else invested? Are you the target user? These are the questions every investor will ask you, so you better build a business with the right answers and get ready to recite them. That’s what Pitchbot.vc helps you practice.
Pitchbot simulates a pitch meeting with an angel, incubator, seed fund, or VC firm. You respond to multiple-choice questions about your product, team, growth, and values as you try to impress the investor. If your answers show you know how to build a great startup, you win a mock-up funding term sheet. Seem like a misguided wantrepreneur, and you’ll get shown the door.
Pitchbot is suprisingly fun, but also extremely educational. That’s because it’s based on the blogs of 20 top investors like Sequoia and Y Combinator about what they ask founders and what they’re looking for. You’ll learn how angels care a lot about who else invested since there’s little data to judge by with new startups, while later-stage VCs want to be sure you’re swinging for a multi-billion dollar exit and won’t sell short for a cushy acquihire job.
“I’ve pitched and been pitched hundreds of times” says Pitchbot’s maker, angel investor, and Gigster CEO Roger Dickey. It turns out the interviews are pretty predictable, so entrepreneurs can gain a big edge by preparing for the common questions.
Dickey built the tool to help out the startup community while showing off what his own startup can do. Gigster let’s anyone with an idea get an app conceptualized, coded, and designed for them for a fee. He comissioned Gigster to create Pitchbot to demonstrate how anyone can create a useful app. Gigster’s full-service development shop has raised a $10 million series A from prestigious investor Andreessen Horowitz, so clearly Dickey knows what attracts funding.
“There’s a lot of mystique and fear, and this sense that you need to get it right the first time or you might burn a bridge. This is why the common wisdom is to pitch ‘friendlies’ first, then use their feedback to hone the pitch, then go make real pitches” says Dickey. “This tool is a like a friendly investor for everyone.”
So will your pitch earn you a massive valuation from the top VCs? Or do you need to go back to drawing board? Pitchbot lets you know before you’re in an investor’s office in the real hot seat.
via TechCrunch
Learn how to pitch your startup with Pitchbot.vc
The CIA has posted a vast cache of nearly 12 million declassified CIA pages online, including info on Nazi war crimes, the Cuban Missile Crisis, UFO sightings, human telepathy ("Project Stargate") and much more. It’s been a long time coming — Bill Clinton first ordered all documents at least 25 years old with "historical value" to be declassified in 1995. The agency complied, but didn’t exactly make it easy to see the trove — you had to trek all the way to the US National Archives in Washington DC to get a peak.
The CIA did release an electronic database called CREST (the CIA Records Search Tool) in 2000, but you could only search document titles and still had to visit the archives to read each document. In 2014, a nonprofit journalism organization called MuckRock filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit pressing the CIA to post all of its documents online, but the agency said it would take up to six years to scan everything.
Journalist Michael Best even started a Kickstarter campaign, Buzzfeed points out, to raise funds to manually copy and scan the documents. The CIA finally agreed to post the entire database online last year, and has now made good on that promise.
So, is there anything juicy in there? Not likely. CIA Director of Information Management Joseph Lambert said the agency did one last check through the collection before releasing it, and did not reclassify any more documents.
However, there’s no doubt a lot of thrilling stuff for historians, war buffs, UFO enthusiasts and others. The archives cover events from the 1940s the 1990s (each year, a new batch are declassified) and include details about the flight of war criminals from Nazi Germany, the quarter-mile Berlin tunnel built to tap Soviet telephone lines, internal intelligence bulletins and memos from former CIA directors, UFO reports and more.
Via: Buzzfeed
Source: CIA CREST Library
via Engadget
12 million declassified CIA files are now available online
After years of fighting with FOIA requesters, the CIA has finally uploaded over 12 million documents to its website. While many of the documents have been declassified for some time, the pages were intentionally hard to access, and only available on a few computers sitting at the National Archives. But now, anyone can search the documents from anywhere.
“We’ve been working on this for a very long time and this is one of the things I wanted to make sure got done before I left,” the CIA’s Joseph Lambert told Jason Leopold from BuzzFeed. Lambert will be retiring soon after 32 years with the agency.
The files contain everything from the CIA’s strange mind control experiments to reports on Communist activity around the world. Many of the pages have already been liberated by the likes of researcher Michael Best and Leopold himself, and uploaded to places like Archive.org. But they’re now all there at the CIA website for your own searching pleasure. All 12 million of them.
A quick search for names like “Donald Trump” yield little more than newspaper clippings from the 1980s about government contracts and “the party of the century.” But those don’t even tell the full story. As you can see from the big white box in the upper right hand corner, they’ve been “sanitized” for release. Why was the CIA keeping newspaper clippings like that? We may have to wait a few more decades to find out.
You can search the entire CIA database of documents here.
[Buzzfeed]
via Gizmodo
The CIA Just Dumped 12 Million Declassified Documents Online
Salary is important, but it’s not the only thing that contributes to job satisfaction. New research from Glassdoor reveals what makes people happiest at their jobs and how it varies depending on income.
Glassdoor wanted to see how employee values change as their income changes. What workplace factors do employees workers value overall, and how does it change with salary increases? To answer this, Glassdoor looked at their own data: salary reports and company reviews from over 600,000 users. They looked at six different factors: culture & values, senior leadership, career opportunities, business outlook, work-life balance and compensation & benefits.
They used the “Shapley Value” analysis method to see how various factors change the overall outlook. They explain:
In other words, under this approach, the six workplace factors can be thought of as a “pie” in terms of predictive power of employee satisfaction. We then add and drop factors from our model, and examine how the “pie” of predictive power changes with each adjustment — how more or less important a factor is to overall satisfaction. This approach allows us to identify which factors are the most statistically “important” predictors to overall employee satisfaction.
Overall, they found that culture and values were the biggest predictor of employee satisfaction, at 22% of the “pie.” Leadership quality was also important (21%) along with career opportunities (18%). Positive business outlook, work-life balance, and compensation and benefits were actually the least impactful predictors of employee satisfaction, according to Glassdoor’s analysis.
Unsurprisingly, compensation became less important as salary increased. After all, if your salary needs are met, it’s one less factor you have to worry about. When income increased, the most valuable factors mattered even more to employees: culture and values, the quality of senior leadership, and career opportunities.
Don’t let this data keep you from negotiating a higher salary, but if you’re looking for a job, it helps to know what other workplace traits matter. To check the report out for yourself, head to the links below.
What Matters Most in a Job When Pay Rises | Glassdoor
Photo by startupstockphotos.com
via Lifehacker
What Employees Value More Than Salary, According to Glassdoor
If someone is firing projectiles in your direction, you might be safer hiding behind a sand block rather than a steel wall, new research shows.
While sand has long been used in military fortification, limited literature exists on the mechanism behind its energy absorption capabilities. A team of engineers at the National University of Singapore decided to find out more about the material’s unique ability to resist impact.
They experimented by firing projectiles of various shapes and masses at different velocities against a common silica sand block of varying density.
The results show that the sand block absorbed more than 85 percent of the energy exerted against it by the impact of a high-speed projectile. Further, the resistance offered by the sand increased with the speed at which the projectile travelled.
The impact also resulted in an extreme frictional force that could break the projectile into pieces, as the sand grains dilate and dissipate the pressure, resisting continual penetration of the projectile. While heavier and elongated projectiles were more effective at penetrating the target due to higher stress at the point of contact, the compaction of the sand held little influence as the projectile compacted the sand along its path of penetration.
In contrast, the energy absorption capacity of an equivalent steel plate reduces dramatically as the velocity of the projectile increases, resulting in the projectile passing through it without further resistance. This is known as the hydrodynamic effect, where the high-speed projectile causes the steel to melt and behave akin to a fluid.
The team says the study points to the wide-ranging potential applications of sand, beyond glass making, building construction, and land reclamation. A key application is in modern defense systems, which has yet to be thoroughly explored.
“Steel, which is one of the key materials used in the construction of armor systems, can be partially replaced with sand as a cost-effective, environmentally friendly, and lightweight sacrificial layer, given its superior energy absorption performance,” says Darren Chian Siau Chen, an assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering.
“Given the possibility of hostile threats, sand could also be used as a complementary building material to steel to enhance protection of critical infrastructure and household shelters, given its projectile-resisting function,” says Chian.
The team plans to further investigate the potential of sand through large-scale trials, as well as explore the energy absorption capabilities of similar geomaterials such as rock rubble.
Source: National University of Singapore
The post Sand absorbs high-speed projectiles better than steel appeared first on Futurity.
via Futurity.org
Sand absorbs high-speed projectiles better than steel