News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
I suppose it was just a matter of time before someone put a sandwich inside a can. Apparently the hard part was developing a shelf-stable form of bread that can stay fresh for up to a year. Here’s hoping the inventor, Mark Kirkland, makes a ton of money from his idea.
Thanks to Kevin for this link.
Link: http://www.aolnews.com/…
Researchers have proven, using mathematical techniques and a heavy amount of computing power, that 20 is the maximum number of moves necessary to solve any Rubik’s Cube configuration by the shortest method. This value is known as God’s number. They were able to mathematically reduce the number of unique patterns from 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 to a mere 1,090,175,792,696,524,800 (one quintillion). Then they used something on the order of 35 CPU years of processing to verify that each of the remaining combinations could be solved in 20 moves or less.
Thanks to Josh for this link.
Link: http://www.cube20.org/
Long-time Chad’s News readers will recall how Kyle MacDonald made a series of trades to go from a single red paperclip to a house. Well now, a teenager named Steven Ortiz started with an old cell phone and made deals on craigslist to trade up to a working Porsche Boxster. Admittedly, it took him 14 swaps over two years, but that’s still pretty impressive.
Link: http://www.whittierdailynews.com/…
(via Neatorama)
Audio, video, and image files are so large that they effectively can’t be used on the internet, or in portable devices like cameras or iPods, without somehow making them smaller. And while there are ways to compress files without losing any of the data (think ZIP files), most of the formats we use today, MP3, JPEG, GIF, MP4, AVI, etc., use lossy compression. A song saved in the MP3 format, for example, throws away some of the audio but does it in such a way that most people don’t notice the difference.
But repeatedly compressing the same file will cause it to lose more and more of the actual data—sort of like making a photocopy of a photocopy. This is why I don’t use Audacity to edit MP3 files, because it first converts them to the WAV format for editing then back to MP3 for saving.
The linked article shows what happens to a video that was re-saved a thousand times. The author created the original video, uploaded it to YouTube, downloaded it, uploaded it again, and so on until he had a thousand uploads. The final video very clearly shows the cumulative effect of lossy compression.
Thanks to Mike Primm for this link.
Link: http://gawker.com/…
Every so often a business or government entity will attempt to release “anonymized” data only to find that the anonymization process fails miserably (AOL, Netflix). The problem is not so much with the actual data itself, but is in how it can be combined with other data sources to identify specific individuals. A researcher has shown that 87 percent of Americans can be uniquely identified with just their ZIP code, birthdate, and gender.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
Barbie has certainly come a long way since her inception in 1959.
Link #1: http://www.engadget.com/…
Link #2: http://shop.mattel.com/…
When falling great distances, the primary survival mechanism is luck. But don’t forget to clench your butt.
Link: http://www.origin.popularmechanics.com/…
(via Digg)
Modern-day smoking bans are becoming more and more restrictive, but they don’t even come close to some of these draconian bans from the past—which include excommunication and summary execution as punishments.
Scientists can now make a drop of oil traverse a complex maze by itself. Be sure to watch the video.
Link: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/…
(via Neatorama)
Nearly everyone is familiar with the Y2K problem, and technically-minded Chad’s News readers know of the looming Y2038 issue, but the Y2010 bug (also Y2K+10 or Y2.01K) seems to have caught everyone unaware.
Starting on January 1st, 2010, some computer systems thought the year was 2016. The Bank of Queensland’s EFTPOS system (in Australia) had this problem, and customers were unable to use their credit cards because the cards had “expired.” Many Germans had a similar problem.
Most computer scientists will figure this one out at first glance (although that didn’t happen here at Chad’s News). Just looking at the last two digits of the years, 10 and 16, should make the problem obvious. The bug was caused by the use of a fairly obscure numbering system known as binary coded decimal (BCD), where each digit of a base-10 decimal number is represented in base-16 (hexadecimal). So a hexadecimal 10, which is normally a decimal 16, is considered to be a decimal 10 instead. The code that failed did not understand this fact and treated the hex 10 as a decimal 16—thus the change from 2010 to 2016.
Link: https://www.networkworld.com/…
(via Slashdot)
According to the linked article, it’s estimated that 1.5 billion Coca-Colas are served daily. When you figure in the other brands owned by the company, the number of daily servings rises to 50 billion. I find that to be mind-boggling.
Link: http://www.busmanagement.com/…
(via digg)
Here’s an interesting article about fulgurites (glass structures created by lightning strikes). And if you like those, you may also like the Lichtenberg figures in the second article.
Link #1: http://webecoist.com/…
(via digg)
Link #2: http://www.capturedlightning.com/…
(via The Presurfer)
