Chad's News

In Obion County, Tennessee, residents must pay a $75 yearly fee to receive firefighting services from the city of South Fulton. Homeowner Gene Cranick decided not to make the payment, and then his house caught on fire. The firefighters refused to respond until the fire began to threaten a neighboring house where the owner had paid the fee. Even then, they did nothing in regards to Cranick’s house and let it burn down. Cranick offered to cover whatever it would cost to put out the fire, but the officials refused.

There’s been quite a bit of outrage over this, but I’ve come down on the side of the the city officials. What do you think?

Link: http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/…
(via The Daily Caller)

While money can’t buy happiness, lack of money can definitely cause unhappiness. Researchers Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman have determined that the cutoff point above which more money doesn’t matter for day-to-day happiness is a salary of $75,000 per year.

Link: http://blogs.wsj.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

According to the Federal Trade Commission, a thief or group of thieves stole $10 million in fraudulent credit card charges over four years by keeping the thefts small (less than $10), spreading them among more than a million cardholders, and never charging the same person more than once. Many cardholders didn’t even notice the charges, but there were enough complaints that the FTC finally took action and filed suit—although they don’t actually know who’s responsible for the thefts.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/…
(via The Consumerist)

From the article: “A Massachusetts man who was rushed to hospital with a collapsed lung came home with an unusual diagnosis: a pea plant was growing in his lung.”

Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/…
(via Ars Technica)

A US family was facing foreclosure and the loss of the home they’d lived in for decades. Accepting the inevitable, they started sorting and packing the stuff they’d accumulated over the years. And what a surprise they found: issue #1 of Action Comics, the first appearance of Superman. It’s expected to sell at auction for about $250,000 (recent sales of the same comic in better condition have gone for over $1 million). This will save the house from foreclosure, but they had to get a comic book dealer to call the bank and explain the situation.

Link: http://abcnews.go.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Supermarkets did not exist prior to the 20th century. Free parking and the invention of the automobile ignition switch were key factors in their rise, and the lower prices during the Great Depression helped as well. The shopping cart was a relative latecomer to the scene, not being invented until 1937. The linked article explains all this and more.

Link: http://www.neatorama.com/…

BP’s internal investigation into the Deepwater Horizon oil spill has uncovered eight unique problems that allowed the explosion and spill to occur. They run the gamut from poor practices/training to equipment failure and bad design.

It’s almost unbelievable how many things had to go wrong in order for the spill to occur, especially since many of them would not have happened if BP was on top of things. For example: “These tests indicated a problem … but were ‘incorrectly accepted as successful,’ in part because there were no standards in place for what constituted a negative test.” There’s also: “That returns us to the automated system that was attempting to shut the blowout preventer. Even though it kicked in, once the explosion happened at the surface, it lost power.” And then finally: “Redundant hardware on the sea floor was designed to operate independently. Unfortunately, it also failed; one of the devices had a fault in a critical piece of hardware, while the second had insufficient charge in its batteries to function.”

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

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/…