Author: mike

If you’re like me, you have probably wondered how much Star Trek’s Starship Enterprise would cost to build if it were real. Billions? Trillions? Is it like $500,000 in Galactic Credits? I know that I have always…
via MightyMega
Infographic: What Would the Starship Enterprise Cost?

Whether you’ve got DIY projects to do or the occasional home repair, everyone needs a solid collection of tools. The Sweethome spent hundreds of hours of research and testing to create a list of the 22 best tools and toolbox.

In the guide, you’ll find specific recommendations for a screwdriver, tape measure, drill, utility knife, hammer, and other essential items. Although the entire kit costs $500, you can grow your collection over time.

Alternatively, we’ve got recommendations for what to put in your toolbox for different levels of DIY, so you can pair that with The Sweethome’s product recommendations.

The Best Tools and Toolbox | The Sweethome

via Lifehacker
Get the Best Tools for Your Workshop with This Guide

Mobile phone data can provide a rich source of information for understanding human activity. Now, researchers from MIT have built a tool that visualizes cell phone use in cities around the world, for any of us to study.

The new tool, called ManyCities, is a collaborative effort between the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT and Ericsson. It compiles mobile phone data — such as text message traffic, number of phone calls, and the amount of data downloaded —from base stations in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Hong Kong between April 2013 and January 2014. It’s all anonymised, so there’s no sensitive information on display, but there is enough data to understand usage patterns, even down the the scale of small neighbourhoods.

What’s nice about the site is that there are plenty of intuitive interpretations of the data available from the get-go. So, you can see how phone use varies geographically, say, or by time, spotting the general upward trend in data use or how holidays affect the number of phone calls. And then you can dig deeper, to compare data use over time between different neighbourhoods or cities: like, how does the number of texts sent in Hong Kong compare to New York? (It peaks in Hong Kong in the morning, but in the evening in New York, by the way.)

There are other ways to look at the data, too, including smart tools that cluster different areas by usage patterns — essentially classifying regions as residential or commercial depending on phone use — or tie in demographic data, to gain a richer picture of why different behaviours are observed in different locations.

It’s easy to see how this kind of data could be used by all kinds of organisations to understand behavior in cities, providing all kinds of people — and not just telephone companies — with insights that can be used to plan and forecast activity and demand. It’s a shame the data isn’t available in real-time, but one suspects it might not be too long before that’s the case.

[ManyCities via arXiv Blog]

via Gizmodo
This Website Lets You Study Cell Phone Use In Cities Around the World

Non-stripping, self-countersinking screw
via Cool Tools
GRK R4 Multi-Purpose Screws

It’s counterintuitive, but sport hunting as it’s practiced in the US is the most significant conservator of animals in the country. And some of that applies even if you’re murdering lions in Africa. Yesterday, I made that point on Dr. Drew, amid much shouting.

Yesterday around lunchtime, my buddy Scott called up and asked if I was free to go on TV. He and I hunt together and he’s gone on Dr. Drew a couple times in the past to discuss this sport. He was shooting something else last night, so suggested me to the show’s producers. I said “yes,” went and got a quick haircut, showered, then walked down the street to the CNN tower not really knowing what to expect.

Shook Dr. Drew’s hand, got mic’d up, had my face airbrushed to mask my hideous features, then walked out on stage, was introduced as a big game hunter and got booed. A skinny blonde chick shouted at me that she was a vegan, a woman from the audience shouted at me that she was South African and didn’t know anything about hunting, but wanted to shout anyways, then another guy shouted that hunting is too easy because we use tools.

The fun part came in the green room after the show when I got to invite Dr. Drew to come hunting and he declined, explaining he was simply too good a person. Then I got to tell some Young Republican that he was a sinner for wearing polyester pants and called Kim Davis “a bigot.”

I guess the TL;DR on the whole issue is that it’s a fact that hunting funds conservation more significantly than goodwill does. That’s a shame, but it’s also a real thing and it’s why populations of lions, white rhinos, whitetail deer and other species still exist in this human age; hunting attaches an economic value to the success of their populations. Is that cold? Yeah. Does shouting on national TV do anything for animals? Not any more than being a vegan helps lions. Would I hunt a lion? Probably not, but Corey Knowlton didn’t think he’d ever hunt a black rhino either.

My point about African villagers not being huge fans of living next to big animals? Read this piece in the NY Times.

You can either be emotional about hunting and ignore the facts or you can treat it rationally and acknowledge its factual role in the real world. Personally, I don’t really care for trophy hunting, but wanted to at least be a voice of reason in this time of manufactured (and ultimately pointless) outrage. You may scream and shout, but hunting will keep on keeping animal populations viable while you do.

IndefinitelyWild is a new publication about adventure travel in the outdoors, the vehicles and gear that get us there and the people we meet along the way. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

via Gizmodo
Watch Me Defend Hunting On Dr. Drew

Wifi networks aren’t ubiquitous yet, and other wireless communication protocols like Bluetooth can suck battery life. So researchers at Disney have come up with an alternative way for devices to talk to each other using LEDs blinking faster than the human eye can see.

The applications seem a little toy-focused at this point (this is Disney, after all) but the technology is impressive nonetheless. Unlike incandescent or fluorescent bulbs, the brightness of LEDs can be controlled with extreme accuracy. In other words, they can be turned on and off at very high rates, faster than the human eye can detect. The other key feature? LEDs can detect light like a photodiode as effectively as they can produce it.

In the same way two ships passing in the night can communicate using morse code, or the way digital signals race down fiber optic cables as pulses of light, two devices can secretly communicate using the visible light generated by an LED. And that’s why Disney Research calls it Visible Light Communication.

Simple examples of the technology include a toy car coming to life when placed under a lamp, or light-up LEDs on a dress illuminating as they’re tapped with a wand featuring a flashing LED on the end. But through the use of a cheap and simple adapter connected to a headphone jack, a smartphone or tablet could receive signals from overhead LED lights, even those operating in wavelengths completely invisible to the human eye.

So invisible LED emitters could be set up around a grocery store, and automatically beam notifications about a sale or a coupon to your smartphone while you’re walking around. And given how incredibly cheap and commonplace LED technology has become, the Visible Light Communication technology could be easier to implement than NFC or other wireless protocols gaining popularity.

[Disney Research]

via Gizmodo
Disney Found a Way To Make LED Lights Talk To Each Other

Of the many new experiences you might have during a high-risk pregnancy, one of the least fun is a fetal monitoring test called a Non-Stress Test, or NST. It really should be called a High-Stress Test because of the anguish it puts parents through. Apple just made it a little bit better.

An NST is the best way for doctors to examine the health of a fetus in the final trimester. Here’s how it works: You’re essentially chained to a zillion monitors for an hour or so while doctors determine if your baby’s heartbeat and movement are normal. This usually has to be done in the hospital and it sometimes has to be done several times in the last few weeks of pregnancy. Due to my high blood pressure, I was admitted into Labor and Delivery six times to do NSTs before my daughter was actually born. (On the bright side, all the nurses knew me when I finally came back to give birth.)

But one of the biggest problems with this whole process is that even with all those sensors, doctors still have a hard time differentiating the mom’s heartbeat from the baby’s, which means they’re moving the sensors around, listening, moving them around, listening. Again, this is all incredibly scary, when you’re already worried about the health of your baby.

Airstrip, an integrated fetal monitoring app announced by Apple at today’s event, can comfortably gather all the information for an NST, even at home, and transmit all its data wirelessly to your Apple Watch. More importantly, it can send all this information to your doctor. But this is not just a UX innovation: Apple’s also partnered with an important medical device to work with it. The streamlined Sense4Baby monitor, which Airstrip acquired in April, looks like a comfy battery-powered band to replace a complicated array of wands, sensors, and stickers. And thanks to the excellent heartbeat tracker in the Apple Watch, supposedly it can work with the monitor to tell mom’s and baby’s heartbeat apart.

The Airstrip system also solves the problem of needing to check the baby’s health during labor—high-risk pregnancies especially need to be constantly monitored. Airstrip can apparently do all of this, including tracking the time and strength of contractions. Anyone who’s tried to squeeze a baby out of their vagina knows that the last thing you want is to be tethered to a fetal monitoring machine. You want to MOVE. And if you could track all of this data—the length and strength of contractions, with updates on the baby’s health—easily on your tiny Apple Watch, you could confidently wander around laboring at home, only coming to the hospital or birthing center when it was time to deliver.

Let’s hope this is financially feasible for hospitals, doctors, and midwives to use—and it’s not just women who can afford an Apple Watch. While I don’t think there’s too much value in sitting around at home checking your unborn baby’s heartbeat unless your doctor needs that information (in fact, many doctors will recommend you not become obsessed with tracking your baby’s heartbeat at home), I can see this being immensely helpful in developing countries with unreliable or nonexistent power. It will almost certainly help deliver healthier babies. And of course, hopefully you don’t need an Apple Watch to view the data—let’s hope it will track just as easily on a phone or tablet.

As an owner of a uterus who has lamented the lack of women presenters onstage at Apple events, and was pretty peeved that Apple’s HealthKit originally didn’t include female-friendly features like a period tracker (they’ve since added it), this is actually one of the best things a tech company has ever done for women’s health. I’m almost looking forward to the Non-Stress Test in my next pregnancy.

Follow the author at @awalkerinLA

via Gizmodo
This Fetal Monitoring System Is The Best Thing Apple Has Ever Done for Women