Back in the 90s, some guy made a hyperspectral scanner using a CCD image capture chip and a Kodak Carousel slide projector. He made a series of filters in the form of slides and played the carousel using each slide in turn as a lens. It was a bit slow and limited by the number of slides and filters, but kind of clever…

According to the CDC, people with healthy BMIs have shorter life expectancies than those with BMIs 10% higher. Apparently, healthy people don't live as long as less healthy people.

People who work for the studios have always had a rather loose attitude towards copyright. Back in the U-matic video tape days, I knew people who had huge collections of TV shows and movies. They usually had their own stuff as well as stuff done by people they admired and a few "classics" just to show how it shouldn't…

Cilantro originated in Europe, but was widely adopted in Asia. It was actually used a lot more often in the old days. You'll find recipes for cilantro pestos and the like.

I love New York. I used to stay at the Hyatt at Grand Central. We used to joke about the crowded lobby. "It's not like it's Grand Central Station", then pause, "Oh yeah, it is." (Actually the lobby is separate from the station, but it's just as crazy.)

This means we can finally get an app for cracking captchas. I tend to give up after two or three tries. Reading those things is something only a computer can do.

Sound like reason 2 to leave autocompletion off. Reason 1 is that it NEVER guesses right. (Granted, I only tried it for a few days, but never saw it guess correctly. Maybe if you use it for a month or two you might see a correct guess.)

So, did you give it a one star review? Leave feedback. If someone sold me a hat that only kept the sun out of my eyes if I wore my blue shirt, I'd slam the product. It's no different with an eBook.

ddhboy is right. Comic books are a sideline. The money is in games, toys, movies and tie ins. This isn't the first time the comic book companies did a number on their own distribution. Didn't they ice out drugstores and supermarkets back in the mid-90s. Now it will be Amazon and specialty shops, assuming the latter…

Before they had 47 inch displays in the subway, they had subway clocks. This was a real breakthrough back in the late 60s when they still had antique mechanical drive vending machines selling chewing gum brands that had been popular in the 30s. The clocks were new, modern, analog and advertising supported. A friend…

How about a shout out to Edwin Land of the Polaroid Land camera who figured out how color vision works in his Retinex theory. In the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell, of Maxwell's equations fame, demonstrated that you could make any color you want from three primaries, effectively inventing process color. In the 20th…

When a successful company starts to focus on building a new HQ, it is time for share holders, and to a lesser extent employees, to watch out. It's called "edifice complex". Designing new office space is frequently a sign that management is not focusing on the business, but on their new home. It isn't always fatal, but…

Meanwhile the banks and financial institutions are forcing you to stop using your real name as your identifier for security reasons. They started merely suggesting the change, but more recently have been enforcing it. Now I have two totally cryptic strings to remember for each institution, rather than one. Clearly,…

My high school had one of these. It was basically an RPN calculator with a bit of memory. Personally, I liked the Olivetti Programma 101 more. It had sleek Italian styling and bizarre "split" registers. Still, the HP was the wave of the future, and a lot cheaper than the IBM 1130 that was our classroom mainstay.

My parents had one of these. Bridge was big in the 50s and early 60s. They used to call those folding party tables "bridge tables" and there were chocolate covered nuts and raisins called "bridge mix". There were even events at which each table of players would get identical hands called "duplicate bridge" where you…

Nielsen gets the big bucks because no one at the media companies can tell shit movies and TV shows from non-shit ones. (Otherwise wouldn't make the shit ones.) It might be obvious to you and me, but we don't work at media companies.

Maybe they can make a "mask" camera this way. It would figure out the foreground object and produce both an image and an image mask. Photoshop folks would love this.

The Portuguese introduced a lot of western foods to the east. Have you ever had the Indian dish, chicken vindaloo? That means Portuguese style with wine, vin, and garlic, aloo. They also add a lot of local spices to make the stuff edible and often fiery hot.

The phone companies let people use their initials rather than first names back in the 1930s. You'd think Google would be at least that up on technology and society. Maybe they were on Seconal?

It's just too easy to get into a "put the item in the bag" - "take the item out of the bag" infinite loop. I can sometimes trick the system into letting me buy one item and pay for it, but if there is more than one I run into some Turing's nightmare of a halting problem. Even the human overseer tends to have trouble…