Trust No One: Kim Philby and the Hazards of Mistrust (2014) - lermontov
http://gladwell.com/trust-no-one/
======
willvarfar
I enjoy Gladwell's writing style and annecdotes, but have become wary of
actually believing any argument he makes with them. The more I know about a
subject the less convincing and more cherry-picked the annecdotes seem to
become.

I think his books are made the same way the evening TV news is:- an editorial
narrative is decided upon, and then people are interviewed until someone says
what the editor wants and that's the clip that gets used.

Buy his books, by all means, just be wary and do your own research :)

~~~
internaut
He spreads anti-information. I wonder if we would be better off without him.

I know sometimes lies-to-children are necessarily part of an education but
sometimes they are just lies that get in the way of understanding.

So far as I can tell he deciphers what most people want to believe is true and
then gives it to them.

Jared Diamond is in a very similar position.

~~~
jessaustin
Haha this seems like the start of a fun game. You see Gladwell and raise
Diamond. I'll see your Diamond and raise Pinker.

Eventually we'll upset someone, who will then have to draw a reasonable line
somewhere between Gladwell and their favored popular author.

~~~
internaut
Not at all, upset away!

I do think Pinker is of a higher calibre than Gladwell but ever since reading
Dawkin's (in the God Delusion) vague idea of some eternal progress towards
'Progress' (which he called the Zeitgeist) I haven't seen much substantiating
why outbreaks of violence should decline asymptotically. A handful of modern
bombs would disturb that nice little chart. Seems like cycles are more likely,
perhaps contingent on solar cycles. If we don't understand why we go to war (I
find most explanations too high level and utterly unconvincing) we should not
predict peace. Things can and do turn on a dime.

~~~
ktRolster
_If we don 't understand why we go to war (I find most explanations too high
level and utterly unconvincing)_

Fear, greed, or ideology. Those were the three reasons the Greeks came up
with.

~~~
jessaustin
Fear and ideology are usually smokescreens for that other reason, at least on
the aggressor's side.

~~~
CocaKoala
Well, you can break "why does a country go to war" into two separate
questions: first, why has war been declared? And second, why do the soldiers
enlist and willingly go?

You can probably put together a decent argument saying "The second War in Iraq
was because of oil", but I haven't heard any stories of soldiers who signed up
and came out of their deployment with the rights to an oil well. If you want
to have a discussion about the motivations for war, it seems foolish to ignore
the motivations of the boots on the ground that are actually making shit
happen out there.

------
brownbat
My favorite part was the story about wine at the end, which had little or
nothing to do with the rest of the piece.

> [Regarding] a don at Trinity College in the mid-nineteenth century:

> In 1848 he published a thesis entitled Horae Apocalypticae, purporting to
> prove beyond doubt that the world would come to an end in 1868 because the
> Euphrates would have dried up the previous year. Harmless enough, you would
> think. But since he was a man of dominating though eccentric personality he
> succeeded in persuading the wine committee of Trinity that it would be
> pointless to lay down any 1853 port because it would not be fit to drink
> before Judgment Day. As 1853 proved to be one of the best vintages of the
> century and as Trinity was the only college without any, his name was not
> remembered with overmuch affection.

It reminded me of an old Jewish saying, "If you are planting a tree and you
hear that Messiah has come, finish planting the tree, then go and inquire."

~~~
yitchelle
Can you explain that old Jewish saying a little bit? It sounds quite though
provoking. TIA.

~~~
bdr
If you are catching a Pokemon and you hear that Halo 3 has been confirmed,
finish catching the Pokemon, then go and inquire.

~~~
mhurron
Halo 3 was released almost 10 years ago. Now, I'm pretty sure you meant Half-
Life 3, I just wanted to be an ass Even then the saying doesn't fit because
the Jewish Messiah is far more likely than Half-Life 3.

~~~
bdr
Oops! Thanks.

------
erdevs
I'm so happy to see the a good deal of skepticism of Gladwell here. What a
change from ~10 years ago when he was near-universally lauded.

Gladwell is an amazinglh eloquent and convincing writer. I only wish I had his
talents there. But oh how I wish he were more intellectually honest with his
subject matter.

Do others have examples of writers with similar prowess of the pen, but
greater merit in seeking truth? Always on the hunt for more good thinkers to
read and all the better when their writing is entertaining and of admirable
skill to boot.

------
mcguire
"Hester Harriet Marsden-Smedley" Wow. Just wow. And apparently it isn't never
lupus.

Gladwell has a knack for making me want to know more about his topics. Not by
reading Gladwell, of course; that would be pointless.

He makes the assertion in this article that intelligence services in general,
and British intelligence in the early decades of the cold war specifically,
are useless. Based on a few examples, he thinks that having MI5 and 6 riddled
with spies had no consequences---either the intelligence wasn't believed or it
was, it was acted on, and people died, but that didn't change the outcome.
Further, he says the later, paranoid period was bad, although other than a
couple quotes from politicians, he gives no evidence.

And yet, the period between 1945 and 1965 was the high point of the Soviet
Union. Taking over neighbors. Stealing secrets. Influence. Striking terror in
the hearts of free world politicos. And then, after the golden age of Philby,
not so much, realistically.

~~~
atemerev
Back in Russia, we considered our golden age to be 1966 to 1982. Soviet spy
stories of this time are no less dramatic.

~~~
eps
That's a very debatable assertion, comrade. If true, the 70s-80s period
would've not commonly referred to as The Stagnation Period. Plenty of spy
activity, granted, but calling it a golden era is an overstatement.

~~~
ktRolster
Lack of purges, lack of famine, lack of war, maybe could find something better
than a Khrushchyovka.......the struggle continued, but there was less
struggling.

------
pjc50
See also [http://www.lrb.co.uk/v10/n16/paul-foot/the-great-times-
they-...](http://www.lrb.co.uk/v10/n16/paul-foot/the-great-times-they-could-
have-had) on Wallis Simpson and spying for Fascism. Anthony Blunt is mentioned
in both articles.

------
eternalban
C-Span Booknotes interview with Anthony Cave Brown, author of "Treason in the
blood"[1] starts off with an recap of his father's life and so far (8 mins in)
it has been pretty interesting.

[1]: [https://youtu.be/ShwR-TsnW0U](https://youtu.be/ShwR-TsnW0U)

------
Aelinsaar
Another Gladwell special, devoid of real substance.

------
swehner
Not trusting Gladwell


Google: What do you love? - brodd
http://www.wdyl.com/
======
buro9
So this is just a mashup page using most of their API's, but without any real
smartness to what is shown... so it ends up looking and feeling like a mashup
from 5 years ago.

Poor execution unfortunately. A better thing to do from the outset would be:
If nothing is found close that box and put it at the bottom. That would be
something fractionally better than pretending it's meaningful to search for
patents or use SketchUp on meaningless things.

~~~
praptak
If you view it as a way to expose the less popular Google services then it's
probably great performance-vs-effort-wise. As a useful service probably not
but who said Google won't improve it?

------
hammock
First thing I typed in, reflexively, was "shit." To great unexpected effect.

Measure popularity of shit on the web. Explore shit in 3d. Buy all kinds of
shit stuff. Make a photo album about shit. Watch videos of shit. Plan your
shit events. Start a shit discussion group. Find shit nearby.

------
pavpanchekha
"Schedule a date with Emacs" --- algorithms say the darndest things.

But more seriously, the execution isn't that great. They could at least filter
the products that don't produce useful results. At the moment, product search
is only advertising its incompetence by telling me it found nothing. Also,
given the built-in obviously-fill-in-the-blank screenshots and text, I'm not
actually inclined to use their products.

Plus, for what "X" are both "Patents about X" and "Date with X" meaningful
statements?

~~~
gosub
> Plus, for what "X" are both "Patents about X" and "Date with X" meaningful
> statements?

robot girlfriend?

~~~
mvzink
Also, <http://d.pr/wiHc>

------
Skywing
Is this anything more than one giant advertisement for all of their products?
It didn't seem to actually do anything.

~~~
yogsototh
Exactly what I believe. I tried "haskell" and "epistemology". See epistemology
in 3D with sketch?

~~~
mattdeboard
I tried a vulgar word for a certain part of the female body that I
legitimately love. The results were... humorous.

------
uprightnetizen
For me, the obvious choice was "japanese women"...

<http://www.wdyl.com/#japanese%20women>

~~~
thristian
"Explore Japanese women in 3D". Well, that's an unfortunate template-
instantiation.

~~~
drivebyacct2
I got the same templates; I typed "gay sex".

... it asked what I loved...

------
hanibash
I was hoping I would see a beautiful visualization of what people across the
world love. Instead it poured out a bunch of information. Why does this seem
typically Google?

------
ez77
It is interesting: the hosting is indeed by an IP address that points to
Google's 1e100.net, but the domain's registrant is not Google, rather an
individual. Moreover, the name servers are hosted by fabulous.com. Go
figure...

~~~
tmgrhm
I'd hazard a guess at saying this was a 20% project and the individual is the
engineer who led (or was sole member of) the project.

------
Thasc
This is an extraordinarily entertaining thing to put rude words into.

~~~
chug2k
i kind of wanted to share my favorites, but probably best not to.

~~~
Thasc
Try 'fun'. Why? Because Google just invited me to 'scour the Earth for fun'.

No-one give Google nukes, clear?

------
lovskogen
I did really love the hit on 'something'; <http://cl.ly/7z3B> (jpg)

~~~
zeddez
i get the same type of result for 'gmail'. Most of the queries result in
pictures of women showing panties or in thongs.

------
anigbrowl
<http://www.wdyl.com/#half-baked> ideas

^ Way to not make your 3+ word searches linkable. Hmmm.

------
ZackOfAllTrades
<http://www.wdyl.com/#lolcats> reveals that there is a patent with the word
lolcats in it (<http://www.google.com/patents?q=lolcats>)

But besides that and "Scour the earth for lolcats", this isn't really doing
much for me. Nice try google interns.

------
redthrowaway
Cool idea, but: <http://www.wdyl.com/#The%20Internet>

Execution's a bit off.

------
ForrestN
I think most people are projecting a bigger ambition onto this than is
accurate. This is not Google's revolutionary attempt at visualized search,
it's a cute way to showcase all the diverse products in Google's portfolio.
"What do you love? Here's what we can do for you regarding that." It's just a
marketing micro-site.

------
paulnelligan
Despite the criticisms, I actually think that this is the best thing that
Google has turned out in the past 5 years ...

~~~
hammerdr
Execution may be poor, but this is definitely something Google has needed to
do for some time. They have many services which serve niches but the
popularity of those services is, in part, bounded because no-one knows about
them!

~~~
paulnelligan
I think they could have done much more with wave - I would have got far more
benefit from it if they linked it to my gmail in some inventive and
unintrusive way ... I'd like to see them rework it because I think it's a
really great product ...

I also think they could do something more with search by customizing results
based on browsing history ... Maybe this +1 button should be contained within
the browser and marketed more as something which stores previous results which
can be called up by search (as well as sharing with 'friends') - could be a
back door into social searching which they so badly need ... They could take
up the mantle of delicious, and make it more social ...

------
jgmmo
I typed in 'my wife' and Google gave me naked lady pictures. I am disappoint.

------
phatbyte
Who created this ? Some google internship ? Sorry Google, not this time

------
paganel
Why would I need to "Find patents about" my favorite soccer team?

------
AJ007
I think I found an easter egg here -- try searching "my wife"

------
zmonkeyz
This looks like the future of domain squatter landing pages.

------
keke_ta
I want to use this with iPad like turning the page.

------
franze
looks like www.123people.com (the box sections) design wise - maybe google
will start to be his own landing page aggregator soon.

------
ashishb4u
love the little scroll-widget on the left, beautifully done.

------
jpr
"Explore boobs in 3D" disappointed me.

------
drivebyacct2
If you didn't notice, they're actually rendering mocked images of the
searches. Which is funny considering the search term I started out with.

------
rishi
looks like pintrest

------
keke_ta
looks like sweet.

------
zobzu
rather bad lol most of it is a Chrome and Android advertisement also.

------
sneak
Man Google, you really nailed it: <http://i.imgur.com/TNSKN.png>


Does Spotify Live Up to the Hype? - earbitscom
http://blog.earbits.com/online_radio/does-spotify-live-up-to-the-hype-oh-and-one-more-thing/

======
zoowar
Nope. Grooveshark.com is a similar service and the free version doesn't have
in-stream advertising. Spotify does have a more refined interface.


Ask HN: Redesign after HN critique (instant "coming soon" pages app) - weirdcat

Hi everyone,
Last Thursday I asked HN for a review of my web app for creating instant "coming soon" pages. The response was great -- you guys really, really didn't like it (and deservedly so). :)
* Here's the original thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2123228
* This is how it looked before: http://soonhere.com/original.html
* Here's how it looks now: http://soonhere.com
It's obviously still a work in progress (there are still some issues, especially with IE, the interface needs polishing, there's no help etc.) but the main functionality is there.
Some stats:
* The original thread got 5 upvotes and 5 comments (not counting mine);
* The site got 150 visitors on Thursday and 30 on Friday (40% from the US, 20% from the UK -- half of that from London -- and 4% from Canada);
* Of those, 5 visitors created an account (1 or 2 with email addresses that looked real).
I'd like to thank nudge, komlenic, SHOwnsYou (I used your first instinct idea after all), pacifika and dlsay for their comments in the original thread.
Now -- before I spend more time on this instead of other projects I have lined up, I'd like to find out if the concept actually is viable. Since a considerable part of its target market hangs out on HN, I'd expect at least a few signups (the first attempt failed miserably here). If anyone signs up and activates any of the paid plans by the end of January, I'll upgrade them to a higher plan for free [1]. Plus, I pledge to describe in detail how it went if the thing actually goes off. :)
[1] (the upgrade from the 'pro' plan is a yet-to-be-named uberplan with image backgrounds, css override and other stuff -- if there's any interest in the site, it will be introduced in February; the pro plan itself is going to get updated as well)
So, what do you think about it after the makeover?
======
guynamedloren
Wow, this is one of the coolest projects I've seen recently on HN. I'm not
sure why it didn't garner much attention, but I think the concept is clever
and the implementation is great. Here are some random thoughts:

\- I knew the purpose immediately upon page load

\- extremely easy to use

\- controls are very intuitive and fun to play with

\- preset colors are appealing and easy to adjust

\- email field and message field are ridiculously simple to add/remove and
look fantastic

\- only usability issue: text does not center properly and I'm not sure why
the text fields for the welcome message are re-sizeable (running Chrome
browser)

From a developer's perspective, it really seems like you put a lot of thought
into the user interface. A user who is not tech savvy would probably have a
painless time maneuvering about your site and understanding the product, which
is definitely one of the most difficult things to accomplish when building a
web app for non-technical demographic. That being said, I just re-read your
description and it looks like you may be targeting the hacker crowd, which I
think is a mistake. Any decent developer (or designer) can hack together a
"coming soon" page without very much effort. Also, I don't think this warrants
a $9/mo pricetag, regardless of the target demographic. Perhaps you should toy
with the freemium model and see how that works out.

Keep up the good work!

~~~
weirdcat
Thanks! I noticed the resizable textareas in Chrome as well; it's on my bug
list. I'll look into the centering thing -- I wasn't able to replicate it so
far (Chrome on a mac).

About me targeting hackers -- I simply assumed, that a lot of people in need
of hosted coming soon pages peruse HN. I know I do. :)

Re. freemium -- there is a free version (no emails, one page) tucked below the
paid plans, 37 Signals style. I'll think about exposing it more -- I wouldn't
want to add email to the free plan, because it involves more user support and
is used only by serious users, which should afford $9 anyway.

------
maguay
You've got a much nicer design now, and the live editor is rather nifty.
However, I really can't see many people using it, especially not at $9. It
doesn't take much HTML skill at all to make a single page like that, and then
there's tons of CMS based solutions like that such as WooThemes' new free
Placeholder theme and the dozens of similar free "Coming Soon" themes and
plugins for WordPress sites.

------
jawns
$9/mo. for a handful of "coming soon" pages?

I'm sorry, but anyone who knows the actual value of such a service is going to
roll their eyes ... and anyone who doesn't know that they're being ripped off
will one day get tipped off, and they'll likely warn everyone they know not to
patronize you. I can't see this being a sustainable business.

~~~
revorad
If you look at the plan details, $9 per month is for up to 10 pages. For
people who have a lot of domains, $9 might be well worth it.

------
komlenic
Excellent redesign! You really incorporated the feedback well and I definitely
found this much more intuitive. Pretty great UI.

Personally, I'd consider moving the text about the free option (that comes up
when you click see plans/pricing) to be a _little_ more prominent, but this
kind of thing really comes down to how you want to approach monetizing. If it
were me I'd be doing everything I could to encourage people to be aware of and
use the free service - I think as it sits you're going to get a lot of "ok
neat" reactions, but perhaps not a lot of people actually using the service
(even the free version). I'd hate to see your work languish... why not do
_everything_ you can to just get people using it?

I think the idea of paying for the email form etc is sound, but as other have
noted, the price may or may not be right. That's something you'll have to
determine.

------
sga
The redesign is much better than the original! The proposition is clear and I
like being able to interact with it.

That said I don't think there is sufficient value yet to compel people to fork
over cash, given that your target audience is likely able to throw up a static
page with an email form rather quickly. Or perhaps the value prop. does exist
and I just don't see it, in which case I'd suggest that you focus on making
the value prop. more clear.

I would find the service more compelling if you provided some analytics re.
visitor information (where/when they came from, bounce rate, etc.). And/or if
you were able to aid in the promotion of the "coming soon" page (not sure how
... maybe advertise coming soon pages within the network of coming soon pages
.... or profile the coming soon pages and then the launched service i.e. early
seo help).

~~~
weirdcat
Yeah, I thought of that. Nice thing is that "soon here" is a brand easily
expandable into anything startup related.

------
damoncali
Not having seen it before, I was confused when I landed on the page. I wasn't
expecting an editor, just an intro page. I would put a traditional landing
page up with a heavily emphasized "try it live" section.

edit: corrected ipad autocorrects. I don't thing a panting page is appropriate
at all.

~~~
maushu
I think this works better, I don't think a traditional landing page would work
here.

------
SHOwnsYou
Now that you've built in the live editor, there are just a few more steps that
I would do.

1: Create a free option. 1 page, include email optin, limited to 2-500
views/month 2: If you're not hosting these pages and allowing them to be
called from your server via js, start doing that 3: Advertise the free option
along with the other two. Tons of research has shown that given 3 options,
users will tend toward the middle option, even if it paid and there is a free
option available 4: Include more info. Build a new page for the "Plans and
Pricing" include the "Go Back" link, but also include more info on how it's
hosted, _how easy it is to use the service_ , and any other relevant details

~~~
weirdcat
Thanks everyone! Looks like this time I did a bit better. :)

To address some issues raised:

1\. Hosting is included; the user has to set the domain's CNAME to
sites.soonhere.com. The page is also accessible via
<http://soonhere.com/site/whatever.com>, so it's easy to set up a framed
redirect if needed. I'll create a downloadable index.html for this purpose if
it's an option people would use.

2\. There are some additional data collected with visitors' emails (referrer,
search engine keywords, country). You can export it to csv (everything) or
plain txt (emails only).

I added this info to the plans page; will add more details and polish it
later.

One question -- did those of you that said it's too expensive thought it was
hosted or not hosted?

------
weirdcat
Clickables:

<http://soonhere.com>

Original thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2123228>

Previous look: <http://soonhere.com/original.html>

------
maushu
Try using a

       text-shadow: 0 0 1px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.01);

for the text. It makes the text prettier in some browsers, like chrome, by
faking anti-aliasing.

Example: <http://www.graphnode.com/stuff/text-shadow.png>

~~~
weirdcat
Ha, looks neat! And with a little hacking it might work in other browsers as
well. Isn't the shadow black though? It would mean that in my case it needs to
be dynamically adjusted to the font color chosen by the user (probably by
generating a fresh css snippet and applying it to the page). I'll definitely
give it a try later -- these jagged edges in Windows made me cringe. :) Thanks
a lot!

~~~
maushu
Changing the color should not be needed (since the alpha is 0.01). Feel free
to use other colors though.

------
mootothemax
Great design, but too pricey for the target audience: I can buy a "coming
soon" design from ThemeForest for $5. If you could compete at that price and
include hosting, it'd be a no-brainer to go with you :)

~~~
weirdcat
I actually _do_ include hosting; if possible, I'd rather not walmartize the
thing and be a "cheap no-brainer" though.

------
ashraful
Hey, great site. I was planning on working on a similar product, and I was
wondering if you would consider partnering up.

Please email me if you are interested. My email address is in my profile.

------
sandipagr
Our ideas seems to have some similarity.

<http://shapea.com>

Let me know if you would like to chat. Email on my profile.

------
revorad
The homepage looks great, but you need to provide a lot more details on the
pricing page. An FAQ list might be a good idea.


Fukushima: Radiation Detection Using Artifacts in CCCD Image? - brudgers
http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/427-Radiation-Detection.html
======
noonespecial
I'd just punt this one. Cover the lens so that the image is otherwise black,
get a good calibrated Geiger counter and wander around taking pictures of your
lens cover and noting the counter's readings.

Go back and count the light dots in your black photos and see if they
correlate with the counter readings. Use your fancy exposure-time/fstop/ccd-
size math after you're sure there's something going on.

For that matter, bring along a crummy cmos sensor camera as well. More
sensors, more fun.

~~~
ars
That's not punting, that's calibrating.

~~~
tomsaffell
As a Brit living in the US it took me over a year (and several
misunderstanding) to realize that there is a difference in the use of the word
'punt' between US and UK. The main confusion was between:

      1. (Informal) To cease doing something; give up [1]
      2. (Chiefly British Slang) To gamble [1]

Often the context allows for either of those to make sense. Off topic, I know,
but maybe it will help others avoid the confusion.

1\. <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/punt>

~~~
noonespecial
Yes, thanks for that. I should know better by now. Once while living in
Germany I asked someone in my German-peppered-with-english-words-for-german-
words-I-didn't-know if they were concerned about the amount of preservatives
in some sort of shelf stable cheese food.

They heard Präservativ when I probably meant Konservierungsmittel. Hilarity
ensued.

~~~
kyleslattery
If anyone's wondering, Präservativ means "condom" in German. My favorite false
cognate in German is "das Gift", which in English is in fact "poison".

~~~
eru
It also bugs me that there's no clear and simple equivalent of "schenken".
(There are words like `bestow', but they don't quite cut it.)

------
RK
I think the problem with trying to determine radiation fluence is that a lot
of the dots appearing are likely due to damage to the detector elements,
rather than instantaneous detections.

I've seen CCTV used to monitor high radiation areas and the images are always
riddled with artifacts from damaged sensor elements, even when no radiation is
present. They have to replace the cameras on a regular basis.

~~~
jmhobbs
I tried using a cheap webcam CCD to make a true RNG a while back, but I had
the same problem. After a while I got permanent damaged elements and it ruined
the randomness.

<http://pics.brizzly.com/1P3J.jpg>

------
lutorm
You can see this in photos and movies from Chernobyl. In some pictures, like
those taken from the roof, there's a noticeable tint to the bottom of the film
as the radiation comes up from below. There's also a lot of noise like in the
picture shown here but much worse, in some movies from inside the reactor.
Pretty creepy. You can see some of the noise in this video, but the bad
youtube quality makes it difficult:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKnFurg5-Ag>

~~~
jberryman
Do you have a link for those photographs? I would think the film would be
saturated generally rather than from below. Also in an SLR the top of the
resulting image would be towards the ground while the film was in the camera,
no?

~~~
lutorm
Your image reversal point is a good one. It might be that it was reversed in
the images, I don't really remember.

I couldn't find the photographs, but they are mentioned at some pointsin the
"Battle for Chernobyl" movie: <http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-battle-of-
chernobyl/> (Highly recommended movie, btw. Very freaky.)

(Also noticed that it's at Google video. Watch it while you can!)

------
ars
You _may_ be able to determine the number of radioactivity events
(becquerels). But you will not be able to determine the type, or the strength
of the radiation. So you will not be able to measure rem.

And rem is what matters for most purposes.

~~~
lutorm
On the contrary, like one of the comments on that page says, you are likely to
only detect gamma. Alpha and beta will be stopped long before getting to the
sensor.

~~~
ars
Not all gamma is the same, the energy matters a lot in terms of how it affects
the body. And of course when calculating the dose you need to know the energy
- you add the total energy, not the total number of photons.

Alpha and beta from distant sources will be blocked of course, but if there
are radioactive isotopes in the environment they may decay right near the
sensor, and you won't be able to tell.

Distant gamma is a much smaller concern than radioactive isotopes in the
immediate environment.

~~~
lutorm
True about the gamma energy dependence, of course, but alpha and beta won't
really get to the sensor unless the decay is inside the camera. And even gamma
doesn't have _that_ long range, even in air. You pretty much have to have
contamination nearby.

~~~
defrost
For reference, you can comfortably detect, measure and map ground produced
gamma radiation from natural elements from a distance of 50 - 80 metres in the
air above.

There's also a respectable number of cosmic ray events in the atmosphere all
the way down to ground level leading to high energy gamma counts as a matter
of course.

Radioactive Iodine and Ceasium particles (in small numbers admittedly) made
their way across the Pacific and became gamma emitters caught up in the air
scrubbers of the University of Washington in Seattle.

~~~
lutorm
Well, cosmic rays can have energies far, far higher than you get from typical
radioactive decay, so they (or gammas produced by them when they hit the
atmosphere) have a lot more penetration.

------
jensnockert
Yes it is possible, and I know people are doing it.

But it is a too short time to get an accurate reading on the level, a single
photograph is exposed under a very short time.

And a camera is probably not shielded against radiation, so it might be
impossible to predict how long the actual time of exposure is.

~~~
niels_olson
I'm a Navy physician, with an undergrad degree in physics, working at one of
the Joint Task Forces assigned to the whole Fukushima mess.

If this had been taken in Tokyo, which is at background, I would have said
it's something else. But right there, at the reactors, they are still very
much in the several mrem/hr regime. Someone could probably calculate this. I
don't think the "speed value" from the EV system is going to be of much use
for this calculation, though the "aperture value" will. Nor does the color of
the pixel tell you anything other than the color of the pixel that was hit by
a gamma ray.

Never the less, a simple count could give you a pretty good first order
estimate. Assume the radiation here is around 10 mrem/hr on 15 March (there
may be a more accurate published estimate out there, I'm just going on trends
. . . I'll reboot into Windows and see if I can get you more accurate info off
our share drive).

[Edit]: Okay, so the 15th was the day of the biggest releases, ranging up to
12000 μsV/hr. Reactor 2 had an explosion at 0610 local, the reactor 4 fire was
from 0600 to 1116 and there was a second explosion at reactor 2 at 1006. The
12000 μSv/hr peak is around 0930 with a second peak of 8800 at about 1000. I'm
just looking at a graph, but it appear to decay down to around 300 μSv/hr over
the rest of the day, then there's another, unlabeled event at about midnight.
The metadata says the image was taken at 0858. This is in the middle of the
upsurge. The area could be anywhere between 1000 μSv/hr and 12000 μSv/hr.

Are there other pictures available from different times?

~~~
Natsu
There are a ton of other photos here:

<http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/news/110311/>

I'm not quite sure which are camera original or which have single pixel
artifacts like that, though. Dr. Neal Krawetz, who runs that blog, would know
though. He's an expert in digital image forensics.

I suppose you could just zoom in, count pixels, then try to get timestamps &
locations out of the images via JPEGsnoop or similar tools for reading the
metadata, but you'd have to contend with however many different cameras they
use, etc.

~~~
niels_olson
The first of the packbot pictures from today also has a small number of blown
pictures.

[http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/news/110311/images/110417_1f_1_1.j...](http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/news/110311/images/110417_1f_1_1.jpg)

taken at 1138 on 4/17.

In thinking a bit more, I guess without knowing how that Sony camera clears
its registers, we don't know how long it took for the wells to collect those
gamma rays (eg: are the registered "cleansed" just before each shot? And then
cleared again after the information is transferred off the sensor?). However,
the "ISO" setting probably doesn't matter. The aperture will matter
essentially as much as the lens matters, and considering the lens is gathering
in light from that entire area, that may be significant, I just don't know.

~~~
lutorm
Aperture doesn't matter. The gammas that make those bright pixels will
comfortably penetrate the shutter, lens, and the entire camera body. It's the
time between erase and readout that matters, as you say, and it will act as a
4pi dipole detector.

------
gtank
Keep in mind that CCDs can be sensitive enough to background that they're
usable as chaos for random number generation[1]. I am not a physicist or
photographer, but it may be that some of those spots are the result of
settings, damage, camera quality (an old Sony?), or just responding to lower
level radiation than you'd expect.

[1] <http://www.lavarnd.org/what/process.html>

------
kristopher
Some HD Video flyovers done by the Japanese Self Defense Force show various
abnormalities in quality once they fly over the damaged reactors. See this
video[0] from the 2m40s mark.

[0] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M22Gt4sswEA#t=2m40s>

~~~
lutorm
I only see weird distortions which I would interpret as aliasing between the
readout rate of the camera and the vibrations from the helicopter. Any
radiation should show up as noise.

------
juiceandjuice
I'm pretty sure you'd only be detecting alpha and/or beta particles, depending
on the materials in the camera. Gamma detection would really require either a
Geiger counter or a pair production type of detector, or a APD/PMT detector.

------
mdonahoe
Cameras are the universal sensor.

~~~
eru
They mostly work for electromagnetic radiation.

~~~
harshpotatoes
It's funny, but there are very few things in modern physics which aren't
measured via electromagnetic radiation.

~~~
eru
Indeed. And cameras probably also pick up some ionizing radiation of different
kinds.


Ask HN: Are there any successors to Anonymouth on the horizon? - x1798DE
I'm often worried that I'm extremely identifiable by stylometric analysis. A few years back, I remember hearing about Anonymouth (https://psal.cs.drexel.edu/index.php/JStylo-Anonymouth) for defeating stylometry, but last I looked, it wasn't super easy to use and it doesn't seem to be maintained (https://github.com/psal/anonymouth last commit in October 2013). Anyone know of anything that's looking to take up the torch? A browser extension would be amazing.
======
schoen
It would probably be good to ask Rachel Greenstadt, the head of the lab that
produced this project and does lots of stylometry research. She'll know about
everything going on in the field; you can find her e-mail address on the page
you linked to!

------
BuuQu9hu
I think it would be a good idea for you to start using it and send pull
requests for any issues you find.

~~~
x1798DE
I don't really know anything about stylometry or about writing chrome
extensions, nor am I super comfortable in Java (plus I have many other things
to do on my plate before this). If I were to do anything, I'd probably have to
fully re-implement it, so I was hoping that someone interested, motivated and
able had already taken up the cause.


WikiRebels- The Wikileaks Documentary - emilepetrone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhTfOL9_HBE

======
DupDetector
A couple of comments from the last two times this was submitted:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2010805>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1997239>


Ask HN: Why can't I buy bitcoins with a credit card? - ritonlajoie

 As far as I understand, paying with Paypal or credit card is nearly impossible over the bitcoins exchange currently. Why is it so ?
For Paypal, I read somewhere that it is because of the chargebacks that paypal allows to the clients. This would make possible for anyone to buy bitcoins, and ask for a chargeback to get their money back, while they still received the bitcoins. Why do Paypal don’t check the blockchain in any way to check that a bitcoin transaction between a merchant and the client has taken place ?
Do Paypal plan to make such a service soon in the future ? Maybe by recording the merchant wallet address as well as the client’s address? This way, Paypal would be able to check for the bitcoins transactions (using said blockchain, as in http://www.blockchain.info ) and then allow or disallow the chargeback to happen.
Do you know why the credit card payments such as Visa, Mastercard, are not used by merchant to sell bitcoins ? Is that because this chargeback issue is in the way, same as Paypal ? Also, do you know if any bank, in the future, has some offering in the works regarding bitcoin payments with credit cards over the internet?
======
sp332
It's simple. If you buy bitcoins with a credit card, you could then issue a
chargeback. So the person who sold them would have the money taken away, and
you would just keep the bitcoins.

~~~
ritonlajoie
Yes, but why do no-one makes a company that will make friend with a bank and
tell them : hey guys, let's do that but check the blockchain before accepting
chargebacks..

~~~
sp332
A credit card is just not the right way to do this. Non-refundable money
transfers (wire transfers, Western Union etc) already exist and work fine.


TX Highway: Bitcoin Cash vs. Bitcoin Core Live Transaction Visualizer - joeblau
http://txhighway.com/
======
jstanley
Pretty obvious what agenda this is trying to push, but I found it entertaining
nonetheless.


Ask HN: Should I focus on getting API customers or direct customers? - paulsingh

I started SnailPad (www.snailpad.com) sort of as a joke about 3 months ago. Now I've got a decent number of direct customers and a few API customers using the service. The volume has helped me justify (and pay for) some pretty badass hardware that I've hacked together to automate most of the process.
I've learned that API customers tend to give me more volume with less margins but require a pretty long sales cycle (it takes time to convince them, have them try the API, receive a few samples, bite the bullet, etc).
I've learned that direct customers are lower volume with (much, much) higher margins and, generally speaking, are pretty quick to get onboarded.
At this point, it's still just me doing the coding, bizdev, mailing, etc (read: everything) and I'm having a hard time trying to figure which of those customer types is "better" way for me to continue organically growing the business.
What would you do?
======
patio11
You have far, far more intestinal fortitude than I do to go into that
business. (It involves marginal work and low margins. Yikes -- software sounds
so much better.)

I'd say "both". My reasoning is that you can use the B2C customers as the
kindling to light the B2B fire -- they're cheap, easy to service, and
numerous. Get them to do your marketing for you. (You can use your existing
technology to quickly roll out linkbait mini-projects: web form + visual
design + PDFification + a letter physically delivered to grandma = instant
remarkable content. You can launch one of these a week: Send A Solider A
Valentine, for example. That is probably a little late but you get the general
tenor of the sort of emotional buttons I'd suggest you push.)

This gives you something to do while waiting for the phone to ring on the B2B
deals, and will help you with SEO. Why focus on B2B over the long term? Well,
it allows you to have much more predictable revenue, and having a lifetime
customer value which could buy a pizza is very helpful once you start think of
incremental-cost marketing options like, say, AdWords.

Mind if I give you the same advice I gave cperciva? Thirty minutes on that
home page will double your sales. Heck, if you're in a hurry, you can do it in
two: put a BIG OBVIOUS BUTTON on it. I don't know, 10 kilopixels of big. Maybe
bigger.

If you have graphical talent, something I lack, I'd collapse the entire sales
pitch into an illustrated:

1) Put in address 2) Type letter (We take PDFs, too!) 3) Pay money and it gets
mailed

I'd put the API & login links in the top corner and the bottom of your textual
description, or somewhere similarly discrete. (The audience for those is very
different than the audience who you want converting within 90 seconds of
landing on your site.)

~~~
paulsingh
Awesome, awesome advice -- I'll start messing around with the external pages
and see what I can do. I've been meaning to do this for a while and have
always found excuses to work on other stuff. :)

I should also mention that my target market is no longer the person that wants
to send a letter to grandma every few months -- I haven't found a real demand
for that service.

That being said, I have found that my ideal direct customer is a real estate
agent, car salesman, insurance salesman or anyone else that does face-to-face
selling to their local geographic market. These guys already mail out ~1K
pieces of mail every month and they have to manually do it all because the
bigger print shops really can't afford to help them unless they were doing
tens of thousands each month.

I think that's where the sweet spot is for SnailPad -- we're making direct
mail painless for small businesses, freelancers and "high touch" sales people.
The margins are so "good" on this side of the business because these customers
want good paper and nice envelopes -- they can't get that anywhere else unless
they go to large print houses, commit to yearly contracts and prepay tens of
thousands of dollars each month.

On the API side, the "ideal" customer is primarily some company that sends a
ton of invoices or other automated documents to their user base (or to their
user's user base). These guys still want the high quality that I described
earlier but they also can't justify the expenses associated with talking to
the bigger mail shops.

In general, I'm really excited about the space I've stumbled into. There
really hasn't been any innovation in a decade or more -- there could be a
reason why people stay away from it but I'm taking a more naive approach to
see what I can do. So far, so good. :)

------
bensummers
Have you done the sums? Factoring in sales volume, your time (dev + support),
marketing costs, growth curve, etc?

Numbers always beat guesses. See anything patio11 writes. :-)

~~~
paulsingh
Yep, I spent an hour or two creating a nice little spreadsheet that helped me
justify the additional hardware expenses, etc. I make it a point to revisit it
at the beginning of every month to make sure I know how I'm doing.

------
wakeupthedawn
You're charging $3 per stamp w/o a plan and at best $1 per stamp with the
intro plan?! Wow! It's cool that you're able to attract customers at those
margins.

I'm a bit confused as to why your API customers are given better rates (I
assume this is why you have lower margins with them). Why not use the regular
rates and give an API key to every customer who wants one?

~~~
paulsingh
Well, everyone does actually get the API key and is able to use it anytime
they like -- I _really_ need to do a better job of explaining the product,
features, etc on the site. :)

For the API customers, I've ended up haggling deals with them to get them on
board. In general, I give those guys the ability to prepay in larger amounts
to get a better per-piece rate or postpay for "higher" rates (believe it or
not, most of the higher volume API-only users prefer to postpay because it
improves their cash flow situation).


Inside the food industry - chestnut-tree
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/21/a-feast-of-engineering-whats-really-in-your-food
======
xkcd-sucks
So, this article highlights important issues with convenience foods, with a
minimum of fearmongering relative to the standard of this topic.

The article claims that rosemary extract is Bad because it substitutes for
BHA/BHT, a preservative. At this point I stopped reading due to an
overwhelming urge to bang my head into the table. Preservation is in fact a
major reason for seasoning-- in a preserved meat, no less! (And BHA/BHT are
antioxidants-- which makes them Good...)

Similarly, it's not surprising that yeast extract (nutritional yeast Good)
contains the Bad MSG. Glutamate is a fundamental building block of life. If
you've ever tasted yeast extract, you will immediately notice that it's very
salty. The only reason to eat it is as a flavor enhancer, because as a major
constituent it's too salty-- except for various Commonwealth countries that
like to put it on toast.

Etc...

Shit, I bet the egg yolks in my cake batter are Bad because they substitute
for cholesterol, an emulsifier and flavor enhancer which is linked to diseases
(it also tastes nasty on its own)

Crappy food optimized for convenience, scale and profit is a huge problem. I
hate-- the actual, painful, comsuming hate-- convenience foods and I double
hate franchise restaurants etc. because they reduce the amount of "real,"
freshly prepared, flavorful food immediately available to me. But that doesn't
obviate the need for critical thinking.

Finally, as a practicing biochemist and excellent cooker/eater I'm Offended by
the insinuation that one cannot be equally comfortable in a kitchen or in a
lab.

Derek Lowe's several article[0]s should be boilerplate at the end of any
chemicals vs food piece.

[0]
[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/04/30/is_that_food...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/04/30/is_that_food_or_not.php)

Edit: after skimming the remainder of the article, it becomes clear that its
author has never cooked anything

~~~
legulere
> Similarly, it's not surprising that yeast extract (nutritional yeast Good)
> contains the Bad MSG.

This is not so much an issue of bad or good chemicals, it's an issue of
honesty. There are tons of products out there with "no added glutamate" that
have yeast extract on their ingredient list. I don't even mind when food
producers hide that they add glutamate by using yeast extract as long as they
declare it as a flavor enhancer.

~~~
tptacek
Labeling glutamate content is a silly idea. The issue is that anyone would
make a "no added glutamate" claim, thus perpetuating the myth that glutamate
matters.

------
CuriouslyC
People who are hung up on ingredients being "natural" drive me nuts. I'm 100%
for rigorous product testing to ensure safety, but if an ingredient is safe
and allows the creation of higher quality food, it shouldn't matter it is
natural or not. Cars, the internet and modern medicine aren't "natural"
either...

There are literally tons of people who will ridicule anti-vaccination nuts,
then turn around and insist all food be "natural", completely oblivious to the
hypocrisy.

~~~
rayiner
The desire for things that are "natural" arises from the wariness of ingesting
something that hasn't been tested by time and human history. There's a long
history of commercially-common chemicals that turned out to have tremendously
bad impacts on human health (e.g. trans-fats, lead in gasoline).

Vaccines raise the same concern, of course, but have dramatic and immediately
obvious countervailing benefits that justify their use. In comparison, the
only benefit from chemical food additives is usually saving a few bucks.

~~~
bsder
> Vaccines raise the same concern, of course, but have dramatic and
> immediately obvious countervailing benefits that justify their use.

Vaccines have an enormous amount of data logged, an actual trust fund
dedicated to paying out if there is even a _whiff_ of an issue, and regulators
who oversee them.

At _no point_ has anyone shown a modern vaccine (last 20+ years) to be unsafe.
Period. Quit spewing your uninformed opinions.

This is in stark contrast to the food chain where quite a bit of it is
uninspected.

~~~
ars
> At no point has anyone shown a modern vaccine (last 20+ years) to be unsafe.
> Period.

That is simply not true. I am pro-vaccines, but your sentence is false.

Simply google: rotavirus intussusception and you will see.

His point about vaccines is 100% correct: Until the vaccine has been on the
market for 10-30 years we do NOT know that it is safe. We might consider the
risk worth it, but do not confuse that for "safe".

This is equally true for all the non-natural food additives. The natural ones
have the benefit of decades, centuries, or millennia of testing. (The only
exception would be things like vanillin that are exact copies of known natural
additives. I consider them just fine even if they are classed as artificial.)

~~~
bsder
Yes, let's (even though 1999 is almost 26 years ago, but okay, I consider
anything after about 1990 to be "modern"):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotavirus_vaccine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotavirus_vaccine)
"In 1998, a rotavirus vaccine (RotaShield, by Wyeth) was licensed for use in
the United States. Clinical trials in the United States, Finland, and
Venezuela had found it to be 80 to 100% effective at preventing severe
diarrhea caused by rotavirus A, and researchers had detected no statistically
significant serious adverse effects. The manufacturer of the vaccine, however,
withdrew it from the market in 1999, after it was discovered that the vaccine
may have contributed to an increased risk for intussusception, or bowel
obstruction, in one of every 12,000 vaccinated infants."

Note the _may_. The number is so low as to make it difficult to correlate.
That's 40-50 cases in a _year_. Aspirin kills that many in a year and we don't
consider it unsafe and we take it for things which are _lots_ less pressing.

However, they pulled the vaccine because the perception in the United States
is that we have adequate treatment for Rotavirus without the vaccine and it
simply wasn't worth trying to correlate.

"Meanwhile, other countries such as Brazil and Mexico undertook their own
independent epidemiological studies which demonstrated that 4 deaths were
attributable to vaccine, while it had prevented approximately 80,000
hospitalization and 1300 deaths from diarrhea each year in their countries."

4\. You will get that many people dying of an allergic reaction to _anything_
if you give it to several million people.

More people die of peanuts in a year. Is that "unsafe"?

~~~
makomk
The official CDC website says that they found it definitely _did_ cause
intussusception:

"The results of the investigations showed that RotaShield® vaccine caused
intussusception in some healthy infants younger than 12 months of age who
normally would be at low risk for this condition. The risk of intussusception
increased 20 to 30 times over the expected risk for children of this age group
within 2 weeks following the first dose of RotaShield® vaccine."

See [http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/rotavirus/vac-
rotashield...](http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/rotavirus/vac-rotashield-
historical.htm). Now, that's not much of an increase in absolute terms because
intussusception is relatively rare, but so is infants dying due to rotavirus
infection in the US - the estimates I'm seeing are 20-60 deaths a year without
vaccination. Even a relatively rare adverse reaction is enough to outweigh the
benefits of the vaccine in the US.

Now, you're right that the clinical trials "detected no statistically
significant serious adverse effects". That's because they were so small that,
even though the adverse reactions were common enough to outweigh the benefits,
they couldn't actually detect them as being statistically significant. Hell,
even if the vaccine was somehow hypothetically killing ten times as many
babies as would've died from rotavirus, I don't think the trials used to
approve the vaccine could have detected that. That's kind of worrying.

------
Puts
I can see a lot of positive comments here, but say that even IF these
additives don't impose any risks to the consumers, apparently this is still
something the consumers don't want. For the industry to then whitelabel these
ingredients is just like Lenovo secretly puts adware on their laptops with the
arguments that they are helping their customers find new products.

I don't want you to help me in secret. I want you to be transparent so I can
make my own decisions!

------
nazgulnarsil
Starting a food startup revealed a lot of this stuff to me. There's something
called "clean labeling" which refers to the ability to put various synthetic
shelf life or flavor enhancing compounds in your foods and label it as
something innocuous sounding due to skirting the labeling laws. The companies
that generate these compounds advertise them as such. This intersects with the
fact that the FDA operates essentially on a complaint basis. That is, if they
don't receive any complaints about something it is very unlikely to ever be
looked in to. And how would you know to complain if the package just says
"modified starch"? So it's hard to credibly differentiate yourself along this
dimension since in some cases there is literally no way that the customer
could tell that one company is using less crap in their food.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
You could ask how the starch is "modified," for starters...

------
rickdale
I live out in the country. My favorite part of the summer is that most of the
food I consume is coming from farms/homes that are within 2 miles of where I
live. Vegetables from one guy, chicken, eggs, meat from another. It's hard to
keep up with it in the winter, but it really opened my eyes as to what I am
eating. I started out just thinking, "I wonder if I could eat without going to
the grocery store." It was surprisingly easier than I thought and then I
realized all the health stuff after. Its nice knowing where my food comes
from.

------
schackbrian
I would be surprised if how easy ingredients are to pronounce is correlated
with their health. Since half of all food is wasted, preservatives could even
be good for the environment.

Ingredients of an All-Natural Banana:
[https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/ingredie...](https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/ingredients-
of-an-all-natural-banana/)

------
tzs
> NatureSeal is classed as a processing aid, not an ingredient, so there’s no
> need to declare it on the label, no obligation to tell consumers that their
> “fresh” fruit salad is weeks old.

Here's how the FDA defines processing aids [1]:

        (ii) Processing aids, which are as follows:

            (a) Substances that are added to a food during the
            processing of such food but are removed in some
            manner from the food before it is packaged in its
            finished form.

            (b) Substances that are added to a food during
            processing, are converted into constituents normally
            present in the food, and do not significantly
            increase the amount of the constitutents naturally
            found in the food.

            (c) Substances that are added to a food for their
            technical or functional effect in the processing but
            are present in the finished food at insignificant
            levels and do not have any technical or functional
            effect in that food.

I have not seen anything that says that it means to have a "technical or
functional effect".

Speaking of food labeling, I just last night noticed something odd at
Domino's. Here is what they list on their site as the ingredients in their
garlic dipping sauce:

        Soybean Oil, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Salt, Natural Flavor,
        Soy Lecithin, Artificial Flavor, Beta Carotene (Color).

I can't help but notice that their "garlic" dipping sauce has no listed
ingredient that has any obvious connection to garlic.

[1]
[http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRS...](http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRSearch.cfm?fr=101.100)

~~~
542458
Could "Natural Flavor" not include garlic? I can't see why not, but IANAL. I'm
actually a little hazy on what the limits on declaring ingredients as "Natural
Flavour" are - they seem very broad.

The definition of natural flavor under the Code of Federal Regulations is:
“the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate,
distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains
the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice,
vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or
similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or
fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring
rather than nutritional” (21CFR101.22).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavor#Regulations_on_natural_f...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavor#Regulations_on_natural_flavoring)

~~~
tptacek
Yes, that's where the garlic is.

[http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrs...](http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm?fr=501.22)

------
holri
The problem lies deeper. The main problem is the alienation between the
producer and consumer. Industrialization does not fit well with food
production. Because price optimization through division of fixed costs leads
to standardized high volume products. But it is diversity that is healthy,
tastes good and is natural.

The Community-supported agriculture (CSA) model or Food cooperatives
(foodcoop) directly addresses those fundamental problems.

------
buttproblem
The author of this article and the food industry seem to know what the people
want:

> Ingredients that give the impression that they originated in a grandmother’s
> kitchen and have not been processed too harshly are of great appeal to
> consumers.

The common convenience food route minimize price and maximize flavour but
ignores nutrition. They are so optimized flavor-wise that they are literally
addicting. On the other hand, "natural" foods maximize "healthy sounding"
ingredients. What if advancements in the food industry were used in healthy
food too? For example, what if we could create a spinach salad that is as
addictive as dorritos?

As an example from the article, the scientists were able to transform potato
protein into something that tastes like "butter, cream, and eggs." There's no
mention of the nutritional value of this stuff but imagine if it was a powder
with no nutritional value (like Splenda) which you could sprinkle over your
previously bland and healthy food to make it taste buttery?

Industrial processes are slowly making their way into the mainstream with
books like Modernist Cuisine. As an example from the book, the common
"grandmother" way to thicken gravies and other sauces is to use flour or corn
starch. However, these thickeners require (1) a large amount of starch, and
(2) have a large particle size. The result is that the flavour in the food
decreases (perhaps now you need to add more salt), and the mouthfeel becomes
gritty. Scary commercial chemicals such as N-Zorbit (Tapioca Maltodextrin)
don't have this problem.

------
Animats
There's no big secret about this. See
"[http://www.foodprocessing.com"](http://www.foodprocessing.com"). Typical
article: "Understanding Polydextrose and How It Works".

Food stopped being "natural" when cooking was invented.

Then there's the darling of the startup community, "Soylent". Not only is it
incredibly overpriced ($85/week) for a soy product, they require pre-ordering
months in advance.

------
fauigerzigerk
OK, so for me, the only takeaway from this article is that we need radically
more transparency and we will not get it from food manufacturers voluntarily.

I'm not sure it will make us any healthier, but at least it may help
journalists do something a little more helpful than dumping long lists of
suspicious sounding names of chemicals on us.

Ideally, more transparency would enable scientists to identify the few really
bad stuffs among artificial AND natural ingredients more quickly.

I doubt it will have any big effect on public health though, as it takes very
long term studies to answer even the most basic questions about the main
components of our food.

------
houseofshards
Relevant here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food,_Inc](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food,_Inc).
(the last time I checked this was available on Netflix)

------
dzhiurgis
This kinda again confirms you should stick to fruit and vegetable based diet.
Although sensationalist title would make you want to think different.

~~~
brandon73
Come again? Could you expand on this?

I'm all for eating fresh fruit, vegetables, roots, etc, but I don't see how
this article supports only a plants based diet? Really I think what it's
saying is avoid mass produced food, no?

For example, the locally sourced fresh beef I buy from my local farmer?

~~~
dzhiurgis
It's saying to avoid processed foods. Most of the processed foods are animal
related. Even the bread has milk inside.

Eliminate the animals and what you are left is plants. Simple.

~~~
WillPostForFood
Milk is not a typical ingredient in bread. In this analysis of 2000 bread
ingredient lists, it doesn't show up in the top 20.

[http://blog.fooducate.com/2010/11/04/the-
top-20-ingredients-...](http://blog.fooducate.com/2010/11/04/the-
top-20-ingredients-used-in-bread-miniseries-part-3/)

As a home bread maker, I've never used milk. Occasionally eggs, or butter, but
mostly just flour, water, yeast, and salt.

~~~
dzhiurgis
Bread itself is a processed grain.

------
jasonisalive
People should focus instead on something that has worsened, not improved, with
scientific intervention and technological development - the enslavement,
brutalisation, and mass slaughter of billions of land animals (not to mention
the treatment of sea animals and ecosystems) due to the continued maladjusted
cultural preference for animal products. How can people winge and moan about
their wounded sense of aesthetic purity (the same people driving this trend by
picking the brand 10 cents cheaper on the supermarket shelves) when countless
numbers of living, sentient creatures are brought into being by us, for the
sole purpose of living miserable, dreary lives, punctuated by sickness and
episodes of violence, capped off by a final often-horrific experience of
slaughter, simply so that we can treat them like small factories, extracting
products from them, then eating their body parts or furnishing our cars and
bodies with their skin?

Why not be simply thankful that you have freedom from pain, sickness,
confinement and slaughter. To complain of the food we eat, as if _we_ are the
victims of our own preferences for convenience and low cost, while billions of
animals are subjected to treatment tantamount of instituionalised torture, is
the height of entitlement.

~~~
kefka
So, plants are less than animals, which are less than humans? Do I understand
that correctly?

All life is sacred. The human over there, or the dog there, or the orchid over
that shouldn't matter: they all have an innate right to life.

We humans have this sense that we are the master of who lives and dies.
Somehow, dogs and cats are pets, yet pigs and cows and chickens are food. And
plants and trees can be strip mined for their resources. But this human master
is based solely on might-makes-right principle.

In the end, for us to live, others must die. That is the cycle we live in. One
can renounce eating meat. Yet, what we need is a conscience and ethic of food.
Or better said: make your life worthy of the beings who died for you.


(1) Design  Quora (Web2.0 Expo Presentat... by Rebekah Cox - Quora - woan
http://www.quora.com/Rebekah-Cox/Design-Quora-Web2-0-Expo-Presentation
======
phlux
So, I'm going to go against the grain here...

I think there is a lot of great stuff about Quora. Design isn't one of them,
here is why:

The site and its team have shown a specific arrogance over voices of
dissension about their design. Visually there are aspects of the design that
make it difficult for people to use - the choice of colors for the text, the
size of the fonts, and the contrast make it tough to quickly sort the
information provided.

Their topic management system is difficult to use. The search box hijacks what
you're typing and provides no easy way to get the cursor back.

The topics and threading of comments has issues as well. Topics lump a large
number of content into a singular bucket, and though you can apply multiple
topics to a question, you cannot filter responses in a given topic.

Commenting is limited to singular responses, non threaded conversations and
are far too easily buried.

Architecturally the site suffers from sever performance problems when there
are a large number of answers to a give question. See this post on companies
hiring in the SF Bay, which on many machines will crash the browser.

[http://www.quora.com/Which-startups-are-hiring-in-the-San-
Fr...](http://www.quora.com/Which-startups-are-hiring-in-the-San-Francisco-
Bay-Area)?

Typical browser behavior gets hijacked/broken as well - HOME and END keys no
longer work, and at times, scrolling seems to break.

The Quora Search Bar, though, does provide good snappy returns of questions
that have been asked from all topics that contain the words you enter. So I
like that feature.

Overall though, I don't know what gasses fill the echo-chamber these folks
design in, but I surely think they are high if thy think the site is stellar.

Further, why do the facebook alum feel like facebook blue is the best color to
use? I hate it - and simply adopting design elements from your previous
employer doesn't show me that you're a great designer.

Also, in this presentation she says "Concentrate on what matters most: purpose
and goals" yet they seem to shoot down any criticism of their design decisions
as quickly as possible, as opposed to hearing what others think. So, if the
purpose and goal is to make a site that is instantly useful, responsive and
navigable - isn't it a good idea to see what users are saying about it and
take criticism?

I really like Quora, but it is in its infancy - I refuse to jump on the
bandwagon that believes this thing came out of the gate mature and tested over
the years.

You want to see a site that has an unbelievably good user experience? Spend
some time on Reddit. Damn good design -- oh and guess what, they implement
pretty much every great UI/UX idea that users submit -- for example, submitter
highlighting in the comments thread is just one.


Show HN: Fotōko – Your perfectly-ish organized photo library  - maham_tayyab
http://www.fotoko.com/

======
maham_tayyab
Hi, I am one of the members of Fotōko's development team. I would love to hear
feedback from you on our product.

Fotōko automatically organises and safeguards your entire photo and video
library in the cloud making it easy to search, browse, and share from any
device. Fotōko uses your Google Drive (One Drive and Dropbox coming soon) for
cloud storage so you have ownership of your photos.

Moving forward we wish to integrate more cloud storage options such as One
Drive and Drop Box so that users can fully exploit the free storage tier on
various storage platforms while being able to browse, share or search their
photos from any device irrespective of where they are stored. We are also
working on OCR and face recognition features to allow better organisation and
search. We would love to hear what you think about the product and what you
would like to see in a product like this.

------
rohaan
How Fotōko is different from Picasa?

------
babarRehman
How many devices I can sync at once?

~~~
maham_tayyab
You can sync as many devices as you like. Simply connect your Google Drive
with Fotōko app on your iPhone. All the photos in your Camera Roll will be
uploaded to your Google Drive. The photos that are present in your Google
Drive will be synced with the photo library as well. Moreover, you can also
upload large folders of photos and videos in your Mac book with our OS X app.

------
rohaan
comment from rohaan ishfaq


The IBMer Who Decoded Bernie Madoff's RPG - nissimk
http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh091216-story01.html
======
KevanM
If you are doing something illegal, never comment your code.


Why did everything take so long? - jseliger
https://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2017/12/28/why-did-everything-take-so-long/
======
eesmith
Concerning the wheel, it might be useful to look at ancient Mesoamerica. They
had children's pull toys with wheels, and other things which were wheel-like,
but no wheels used in transport.

The common explanation, for example at [http://www.zoesaadia.com/real-smart-
folks-but-no-wheel/](http://www.zoesaadia.com/real-smart-folks-but-no-wheel/)
, is that wheels aren't very useful without draft animals, and without land
which is conducive to road-building (vs, say, water transport).

~~~
bryanlarsen
The counter example is the Chinese wheelbarrow, which is useful without draft
animals and without roads, but that also makes your point. It's sophisticated
enough that it's not hard to understand why it took so long to be invented
without anything simpler and useful to evolve from.

~~~
eesmith
Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't know about that history.
[http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-
wheelbarr...](http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-
wheelbarrow.html/) gives more details, like:

> The one-wheeled vehicle appeared around the time the extensive Ancient
> Chinese road infrastructure began to disintegrate. Instead of holding on to
> carts, wagons and wide paved roads, the Chinese turned their focus to a much
> more easily maintainable network of narrow paths designed for wheelbarrows.
> The Europeans, faced with similar problems at the time, did not adapt and
> subsequently lost the option of smooth land transportation for almost one
> thousand years.

> ... It is interesting to note that the wheelbarrow appeared at least 2,000
> years later than two-wheeled carts and four-wheeled wagons.

------
aaronchall
Just because we haven't found evidence of progress in early civilizations
doesn't mean it wasn't there. Any small marginal gains were probably
immediately lost to time, though.

We needed civilization to spread out enough for commerce to protect new
inventions from luddite regime changes to avoid losing progress (think Mao's
book burning and communist regimes like Pol Pot's slaughtering
academics/people who look smart - probably based on what Qin Shi Huang did
2000 years ago.)

------
smoll
Why is a wheel even useful? Sounds like a solution in search of a problem. I
remember the good old days when we didn't even think about needing wheels for
all the made up problems we've created for ourselves.

Honestly though, just replace wheel with AI and that's exactly what most non-
techie people I know think about AI. Humans probably haven't changed that much
since 4000 BC.

------
hago1234
We hate creatve people who want to take our nice things and change them into
sonething weird. We make an effort to kill that behaviour in people.

There probably is some good excuse for the instinct, some experience long long
ago.

I'm coining the graffiti fish phenomenon to illustrate the concept. Tell me
you didnt like it.


Can Repelling Magnets Replace the Spring in a Pogo Stick? - mhb
https://www.kjmagnetics.com/blog.asp?p=pogo-stick-spring
======
umvi
Seems like electromagnets could help compensate for distance by drawing more
current when far apart, and less when close together. A microcontroller could
essentially make the force linear like a spring. Of course, then you need
wires hooked up to your pogo, and that might be scary if the microcontroller
has a bug (or somehow fails) since you are now essentially hopping onto a
railgun.

~~~
azhenley
About as scary as my Tesla on autopilot going around a curve at 75mph. Every
time I ask myself, what if there is a bug or if it turns off...

~~~
gumby
Consider not going on a modern airliner. Every commercial passenger jet since
the A340 has been fly-by-wire.

(military jets have been so longer).

~~~
jolmg
But you have more time to react on a plane and switch to manual override. It's
not like people fly with just a few meters distance to other airplanes.
There's also a good distance to the only other thing you can crash into, the
ground, as opposed to driving between walls or with a cliff to one side.

~~~
hexane360
OP said "fly by wire", meaning there's no non electronic systems to fall back
on. If the electronics fail there's no "manual override".

~~~
vvillena
Of course there's a fallback. If the fly-by-wire system fails, there's another
whole fly-by-wire system ready to take over. Usually this is safer than the
old redundant hydraulics systems where all the lines ran close together,
making them vulnerable to localized impact damage and fire.

~~~
hexane360
I specifically said "non-electronic" fallback.

------
Sharlin
> _For the 4, 5 and 6 magnet stacks, the outermost gaps tended to be a bit
> larger than the inner gaps. Why?_

> _As we add more magnets to the stack, the maximum pull force alternates up
> and down. If 2 magnets repel with some force, 3 is a little less, but 4 is a
> little more 3, but 5 is a little less than 4, etc. Why is this so?_

Shouldn't these guys have figured it out pretty easily? Both seem to be
readily explained by the fact that it's not just the adjacent pairs of magnets
that interact. Given magnets ABCD, the A magnet is repelled by B and D but
attracted by C. B is equally repelled by A and C, but attracted by D. And so
on.

~~~
hinkley
Seems like they missed a trick by arranging the magnets above three so that
some of them are paired. You’d probably get more travel but not sure how the
force would be affected and neither did they.

You could try A BC D, AB CD, AB C DE and A BCD E.

------
emilfihlman
The core issue that's not mentioned is that we want a certain kind of a curve
for deceleration because that what determines how the spring works. Little
resistance first and lots at the end means it's not much different from just
falling down!

------
dchichkov
Seem like an attempt of replacing a large, fine-tuned, atomic scale
electromagnetically interacting system with a much simpler, less fine-tuned
one.

~~~
sitkack
The Universe is already running the best code for the job.

------
rrggrr
Fully compressed I believe the opposite poles fields begin to attract each
other, counteracting the matching poles repelling one another, and explaining
the alternating pull force.

~~~
jaytaylor
This is easily solved by including a minimal height spacer between the two
magnets to prevent them from getting too close.

~~~
guntars
They spacer could even be a spring to add a bit of springiness.. Oh, wait.

------
axaxs
Loved the video. Didn't love the loud beep near the end, that's at about 3x
the volume of the speaker the whole video...

~~~
CamperBob2
YouTube desperately needs an audio compressor feature. Can't imagine why they
haven't implemented that yet, it's more or less trivial.

~~~
callalex
I agree that they should, but it’s pretty reductionist and arrogant to call it
“trivial”. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all dynamic compressor.
You would also need a fairly sophisticated content detection system (don’t
distort anything that is music, which is a huge use case on YouTube for
example). Not to mention adding _any_ steps to their intake pipeline requires
more processing power and data moving than you and I will ever touch in our
lifetimes.

~~~
CamperBob2
Speaking as a reasonably-experienced audio and DSP programmer -- and
considering that the feature has existed in just about every home theater
receiver for the past 20 years -- yes, it's trivial.

YouTube has the advantage of being able to preprocess the audio track in its
entirety, although most implementations work on a block basis and don't need
that. A 'night mode' feature would take about one weekend's worth of work from
start to finish.

 _You would also need a fairly sophisticated content detection system (don’t
distort anything that is music, which is a huge use case on YouTube for
example)._

No, you need a button that the user can press to turn the feature on and off.
It should default to 'off.' For extra points, make it a slider.

 _Not to mention adding _any_ steps to their intake pipeline requires more
processing power and data moving than you and I will ever touch in our
lifetimes._

Compared to the work needed to process the video itself, it would be a total
non-issue.

~~~
dcwca
The audio compression / limiting can be done client-side, at playback time,
offloading the cost of the operation

~~~
CamperBob2
True, but that would involve modifications to the decode side of the audio
codec. That's where the feature should be implemented (if not in the OS
itself) but it's apparently not there. It needs to be supported on every
platform, and deploying it wouldn't be anyone's idea of trivial.

On the server side, they could maintain a separate compressed audio track and
switch to it when requested. They should have the ability to do that anyway
for alternate languages and commentaries and such. Whether it would be more
cost-effective to maintain a separate set of compressed tracks or to
decode/compress/re-encode on the fly, I don't know.

It might be tempting to maintain caches of compressed tracks created on
demand. That way they'd almost never incur a runtime penalty on the server,
and also wouldn't have to pay a lot for storage. More than a weekend's worth
of work at that point, though.

------
tedunangst
The response could be a closer approximation of linear by using six tubes, two
magnets each, with varying initial distances. As the stick compresses,
additional magnets contribute force, but not all at once.

~~~
scythe
Just have two fixed magnets and two moving ones:

[+- +-> ===== <-+ -+]

As long as the open-wide distance is capped you should have a smoother
distance-energy diagram.

------
CapacitorSet
Unsurprisingly, an inverse-square mechanism can't replace a linear one over a
wide working range.

~~~
bigiain
I wonder if there’s a Fourier transform equivalent that’d let you stack up
various inverse square curves to appropriate a linear curve?

~~~
ta_egdhs
yes. any set of complete functions form a vector space and can be used in a
linear sum to appropriate other functions in the same space. the dot product
tells you the value of the coefficients. The fourier transform is just a
special case of this.

------
rootusrootus
Could you use a lever to multiply travel distance while working with very
strong magnets close together to make the force curve a bit more linear?

------
madengr
Where does the heat go? The spring will have a much larger surface area to
dissipate the heat. Maybe surrounding the magnets with a copper tube will
conduct some eddy currents.

~~~
notacoward
A lot of science museums have a display showing how magnets and copper pipes
interact. In short, because of Lenz's Law, the magnet's motion induces an
opposing magnetic field in the pipe ... which suggests another possible way to
make a pogo stick with the right kind of resistance curve as well as
addressing the heat issue.

~~~
contravariant
A mechanism that absorbs any kinetic energy would make for a very
disappointing Pogo stick.

~~~
notacoward
If it absorbed _all_ of the energy that would be a problem, but any child who
has seen one of those science-museum displays I mentioned can tell that's not
the case.

~~~
contravariant
You don't really want a pogo stick to absorb any energy, it'd be like trying
to make a pogo stick out of mud.

------
amelius
They should try this with electromagnets, and make the curve linear using
electronics (and perhaps find the optimum curve in terms of fun when jumping
around).

~~~
TeMPOraL
Wouldn't that consume a lot of electricity?

~~~
amelius
Probably yes, but it would be an interesting experiment. By the way, they
could use superconductor magnets :)

------
jcoffland
I would still like to see someone build a pogo stick with many magnets with
alternating polarity. This article indicates that it would work. Seven strong
magnets with a 1" initial gap between each of them should work.

------
dTal
If you really wanted to do this, I reckon the way would be to have one set of
magnets on the moving shaft and another set surrounding it, so the the
repulsion tends to keep the shaft centered. Then you make the shaft surround
taper towards the top, so that the further the pole is pushed in, the closer
together the magnets are forced. You should be able to achieve any force curve
desired with this setup by making the taper non-linear.

~~~
harshreality
Just use current designs which, I would think, mechanically constrain the pogo
stick except in one direction. Replace spring with powerful magnet (pair), and
make sure there's a stop pin or something similar to keep the magnetic pogo
stick from disassembling itself.

I think you're making things too difficult and expensive if you're trying to
magnetically suspend and stabilize the pogo stick in multiple/all directions.

Also, magnetic radial stabilization would be stable only in a rough sense. The
pogo stick handle would still wobble and be disturbingly/unexpectedly
unsteady. I think for pogo sticks you'd really want a mechanically confined,
piston-like design. You could still have magnetic stops on both extremes.

~~~
dTal
Although it's an interesting idea, I didn't mean to suggest _only_ using the
magnets to center it - I was merely clarifying the geometry.

Another advantage of my design is that it allows (requires, in fact) one to
use many small magnets in place of a few large ones, which is safer and easier
to engineer. But as for expense - I think that once you decide to replace
springs with magnets in a pogo stick, you have left the path of economy anyway
and might as well go for broke.

------
briantakita
Maybe a series of magnet pairs, spaced at different heights, could approximate
the spring effect. Each pair would be bound together (e.g. with strapping)
with the negative charge being on the outside, since Earth has a negative
charge. The bottom of the stick would have the strongest magnet, negative
charge facing up.

-

+

+

-

The pairs could then repulse each other at a closer distance, approximating
the spring function. I accept royalty donations :-)...but it's probably
patented by now.

------
jcriddle4
What about a hybrid system with springs for the longer travel but magnets for
when you are about to bottom out?

------
Xcelerate
I’ve often thought it might be interesting to replace the springs in a piano’s
action with electromagnets so you could have control over the exact touch
profile.

~~~
callalex
I don’t think pianos typically have any springs, everything is gravity powered
with counterweights. The only springiness comes from striking the strings as
far as I know. Only the really cheap electronic keyboards use springs. Even
halfway decent electronic pianos still rely on counterweights.

~~~
ordu
I cannot speak about any piano, because I had chance to tinker with only one,
but that piano had springs.

Keys itself return into their normal position because of gravity, but part of
key action mechanism was powered by a spring. I discovered it while trying to
fix some keys which was too slow to "recharge", to return to a normal position
after a soft note, so I was unable to make a sequence of a short duration soft
notes from the same key. I fixed it by stretching springs long enough for a
plastic deformation to occur. Loud notes worked ok, because their "recharge"
was driven fully by springness of the strings.

Though it was just one piano, I do not know how different the mechanics can be
between different pianos.

------
xvedejas
Would it be possible to put the magnets in some kind of tube which blocks
magnetic flux, in order to get a linear relationship instead of the square
law?

------
truethrowa
How can they stack three magnets with the repelling side facing each other on
all three magnets? Isn't one side repelling and the other attracting?

~~~
shagie
You can do some interesting things with magnets. Consider the Halbach array (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halbach_array](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halbach_array)
) often used for refrigerator magnets.

That said, the 3 magnet configuration would be:

NS - SN - NS

From the article:

> We added a third magnet, alternating which way the polarity faces with each
> magnet. Each magnet repels any adjacent magnets.

------
hammock
Can we make an electronagnetic-sprung mattress?

~~~
J5892
That would really suck in a power outage.

~~~
mhh__
Or if you wet yourself

------
EADGBE
I literally can't wait for N-Gate's distillation of this thread.

------
8note
permanent magnets tend to demagnetize when you beat them around, too

------
cagenut
could some kind of conical shape offset the different power curve?

------
baroffoos
Don't magnets lose their magnetism with repeated drops?

------
dsfyu404ed
TL;DR Yes but not very well. A spring made from magnets doesn't have a close
to linear spring rate like a traditional coil spring does.

~~~
jldugger
But is it linear, from the data? They had two datapoints and projected from
that sparse data a regression line.

~~~
twtw
There are far more than two data points on all of the charts in the article.
What chart are you looking at?

~~~
jldugger
The youtube video mostly.

------
debt
In the similar vein I wonder if exploding lithium ion batteries can be used as
small rocket fuel

------
0ld
they did freedom units math! quite a feat

~~~
v768
Yep, still quite hard to read.

------
stevespang
The ability of permanent ferromagnets to resist (or survive) attacks on their
permanent field orientations is related to their intrinsic coercivity Hci. In
general, rare earth magnets are much more resistant, however, radiation,
excessive heat, serious EM pulses, extreme magnetic field pressure as in this
case, will degrade magnets. The degree of symmetry is relevant, as highly
asymmetrical designs are much less resistant to magnetic field pressure such
as in the case of Halbach arrays. I have constructed several Halbach arrays
from N35 Neo magnets purchased from K&J magnetics 10 years ago that have lost
approx 50% of their force compared to when newly built. Magnet manufacturers
can produce a custom run of a high, extremely high, or even ultra high Hci
magnets for a price. In past times this was done by increasing expensive
dysprosium content, but now there are multiple ways, and I would suggest the
Japanese lead in these efforts. I believe Ames Labs patented a form of
nitrogen doped carbon which has an Hci that is rather astounding, but to date
it is not a stable product.


Empire Interactive to Produce Mensa-Licensed Video Games - gnoupi
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22264

======
gnoupi
"Mensa approved", or how to advertise more on the "2% of intelligent people"
sectarism. "Buy this game, it's dedicated to smart people only!" ... I predict
nice success, you know "Mensa level", how to prove yourself smart, playing
same games as "the elite"...

Not much more comment needed.