Undead Astronauts

Say that you’ve tried every diet out there and they’ve never worked because you couldn’t stick to the plan. Your self control waivers as you see the next serving of pie…

The answer may come in the form of augmented reality which makes food you hold in your hands appear larger than it really is. Studies have shown that food that appears bigger causes people to ingest less of it, and that’s been reproduced with this AR setup.

The quality of the image needs work as it’s scaled up, but maybe they can run some filters over it to improve the look. One can only imagine the other uses for something like this… like your girlfriend’s bust size? Or even more interesting… her face. No need for expensive surgeries. Just plop on a set of glasses and any girl could look like your dreamgirl. Shallow Hal, eat my shorts.

I came across a fascinating article awhile back about a physicist talking to an economist about the limits of economic growth or lack thereof. Previously, I held the view that there was no such limit or if there was a limit, it would be ages before we hit it. I thought that a capitalist system would unfailingly find a way to get more productivity and/or more efficiency out of the same resources practically ad infinitum. After reading the article, I’m convinced that not only will it not happen, but that other advances might similarly be in jeopardy of failing to meet the expectation of continual improvement. Growth is not unbounded and exponential but rather sigmoidal.

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1. 90% of Asian schoolkids are nearsighted. That’s insane.

2. Some very original tutting to dubstep by two south Asians. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen hair tutting before.

3. Narrative science improves. While previously relegated to sports tickers, advances may broaden the horizon of computer written news.

4. In 10 years, will our brains be wired for browsing?

Ever wonder what the police can get off of your phone if they were to use Lantern?

http://viaforensics.com/education/white-papers/iphone-forensics/lantern/

http://gizmodo.com/#!5796373/watch-how-the-police-raid-your-cellphone

In short, basically everything. Contacts, call log, messages, browser history, app data (fb, skype), geo location history..etc. I’m not entirely sure how it is actually able to access this data, but in the past it was possible to make an unencrypted backup from the phone when you connect it to a machine. From there you could pick apart all of the data you need, since it essentially dumped the contents of your phone. Nobody seems to care about fixing whatever gaping security hole is allowing this, so I imagine police and criminals alike will be hijacking your phone data using the same methods.

No luck for android users either, forensics are in testing already. I guess at some point we’ll all have to start rooting and encrypting our phones :)

You shouldn’t steal at all, but if you’re stealing laptops then wipe the thing before using it. Or at least don’t do anything embarrassing. Can’t wait to see what else Mark has on this guy.

http://www.switched.com/2011/03/22/mark-bao-tracks-laptop-thief/

I suppose it shouldn’t be that surprising, but Apple has found another way to make it harder to service your own gear. This is a non-standard screw, giving you two choices: buy a special screwdriver from a place like ifixit, or take it to Apple to get it fixed.

The best part is that if you bring in an older device for service that doesn’t have the pentalobe screws, they will replace your standard screws with the pentalobe ones. Wonderfully evil :)

more info: http://www.ifixit.com/blog/blog/2011/01/20/apples-diabolical-plan-to-screw-your-iphone/

Funny story about a hacker having his laptop stolen and its recovery, it starts around 5 mins in. It is less about outright hacking since he had root access to the machine (it is his laptop after all), but it shows some of the stages of having your machine compromised.