By Jason Kottke, kottke.org – July 01, 2010 at 09:37AM
Pretty good…except that they forgot Corky St. Clair’s “I hate you and I hate your ass face” from Waiting for Guffman.
Davis Deluxe Rigging Knife
By (author unknown), Cool Tools – July 01, 2010 at 09:00AM
This knife/marlinspike/ shackle-wrench/ screwdriver is one of the simplest and most reliable tools I own. It contains a decent sheepsfoot blade, a locking curved marlinspike, a very simple lever wrench, and a nice large flat screwdriver all in one shiny stainless steel package.
Before owning a sailboat I never realized the need for such a thing, and in fact had never even noticed them as real tools. I thought they were some sort of romantic holdover from another era. Not until I started working with ropes, lines and shackles on the boat did I fully realize the critical necessity for such a tool. I can’t imagine life without one now. I own two of them, two different brands, but the one I keep abusing is the Davis, the “other” one is pretty but not quite as effective.
It works very well, is relatively inexpensive and even looks cool! Cheap, virtually indestructible, invaluable to anyone who works with rope/line. I’ve put this tool to the test daily since I bought it a year ago and swear my greatest confidence that this is, hands down, one of the coolest tools ever!
— Seamus Holley
Davis Deluxe Rigging Knife
$25
Available from Amazon
Manufactured by Davis
Tooth regeneration gel
By Jason Kottke, kottke.org – June 30, 2010 at 10:00PM
Scientists have developed a gel that rebuilds teeth. It could replace drilling & filling as the treatment of choice for cavities.
The gel or thin film contains a peptide known as MSH, or melanocyte-stimulating hormone. Previous experiments, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that MSH encourages bone regeneration.
Bone and teeth are fairly similar, so the French scientists reasoned that if the MSH were applied to teeth, it should help healing as well.
To test their theory, the French scientists applied either a film or gel, both of which contained MSH, to cavity-filled mice teeth. After about one month, the cavities had disappeared, said Benkirane-Jessel.
Tags: medicine
What Caffeine Actually Does to Your Brain [Explainer]
By Kevin Purdy, Lifehacker – July 13, 2010 at 12:00PM
For all of its wild popularity, caffeine is one seriously misunderstood substance. It’s not a simple upper, and it works differently on different people with different tolerances—even in different menstrual cycles. But you can make it work better for you.
Photo by rbrwr.
We’ve covered all kinds of caffeine “hacks” here at Lifehacker, from taking “caffeine naps” to getting “optimally wired.” And, of course, we’re obsessed with the perfect cup of coffee. But when it comes to why so many of us love our coffee, tea, soda, or energy drink fixes, and what they actually do to our busy brains, we’ve never really dug in.
While there’s a whole lot one can read on caffeine, most of it falls in the realm of highly specific medical research, or often conflicting anecdotal evidence. Luckily, one intrepid reader and writer has actually done that reading, and weighed that evidence, and put together a highly readable treatise on the subject. Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine, by Stephen R. Braun, is well worth the short 224-page read. It was released in 1997, but remains the most accessible treatise on what is and isn’t understood about what caffeine and alcohol do to the brain. It’s not a social history of coffee, or a lecture on the evils of mass-market soda—it’s condensed but clean science.
What follows is a brief explainer on how caffeine affects productivity, drawn from Buzz and other sources noted at bottom. We also sent Braun a few of the questions that arose while reading, and he graciously agreed to answer them.
Caffeine Doesn’t Actually Get You Wired
Right off the bat, it’s worth stating again: the human brain, and caffeine, are nowhere near totally understood and easily explained by modern science. That said, there is a consensus on how a compound found all over nature, caffeine, affects the mind.
Every moment that you’re awake, the neurons in your brain are firing away. As those neurons fire, they produce adenosine as a byproduct, but adenosine is far from excrement. Your nervous system is actively monitoring adenosine levels through receptors. Normally, when adenosine levels reached a certain point in your brain and spinal cord, your body will start nudging you toward sleep, or at least taking it easy. There are actually a few different adenosine receptors throughout the body, but the one caffeine seems to interact with most directly is the A1 receptor. More on that later.
Enter caffeine. It occurs in all kinds of plants, and chemical relatives of caffeine are found in your own body. But taken in substantial amounts—the semi-standard 100mg that comes from a strong eight-ounce coffee, for instance—it functions as a supremely talented adenosine impersonator. It heads right for the adenosine receptors in your system and, because of its similarities to adenosine, it’s accepted by your body as the real thing and gets into the receptors.
Update: Commenter dangermou5e reminds us of web comic The Oatmeal’s take on adenosine and caffeine. It’s concise:
More important than just fitting in, though, caffeine actually binds to those receptors in efficient fashion, but doesn’t activate them—they’re plugged up by caffeine’s unique shape and chemical makeup. With those receptors blocked, the brain’s own stimulants, dopamine and glutamate, can do their work more freely—”Like taking the chaperones out of a high school dance,” Braun writes in an email. In the book, he ultimately likens caffeine’s powers to “putting a block of wood under one of the brain’s primary brake pedals.”
It’s an apt metaphor, because it spells out that caffeine very clearly doesn’t press the “gas” on your brain, and that it only blocks a “primary” brake. There are other compounds and receptors that have an effect on what your energy levels feel like—GABA, for example—but caffeine is a crude way of preventing your brain from bringing things to a halt. “You can,” Braun writes, “get wired only to the extent that your natural excitatory neurotransmitters support it.” In other words, you can’t use caffeine to completely wipe out an entire week’s worth of very late nights of studying, but you can use it to make yourself feel less bogged down by sleepy feelings in the morning.
These effects will vary, in length and strength of effect, from person to person, depending on genetics, other physiology factors, and tolerance. But more on that in a bit. What’s important to take away is that caffeine is not as simple in effect as a direct stimulant, such as amphetamines or cocaine; its effect on your alertness is far more subtle.
It Boosts Your Speed, But Not Your Skill—Depending on Your Skill Set
Johann Sebastian Bach loved him some coffee. So did Voltaire, Balzac, and many other great minds. But the type of work they did didn’t necessarily get a boost from their prodigious coffee consumption—unless their work was so second-nature to them that it felt like data entry.
The general consensus on caffeine studies shows that it can enhance work output, but mainly in certain types of work. For tired people who are doing work that’s relatively straightforward, that doesn’t require lots of subtle or abstract thinking, coffee has been shown to help increase output and quality. Caffeine has also been seen to improve memory creation and retention when it comes to “declarative memory,” the kind students use to remember lists or answers to exam questions.
(In a semi-crazy side note we couldn’t resist, researchers have implied this memory boost may be tied to caffeine’s effect on adrenaline production. You have, presumably, sharper memories of terrifying or exhilarating moments in life, due in part to your body’s fight-or-flight juice. Everyone has their “Where I was when I heard that X died” story, plugging in John F. Kennedy, John Lennon, or Kurt Cobain, depending on generational relatability).
Then again, one study in which subjects proofread text showed that a measurable boost was mainly seen by those who could be considered “impulsive,” or willing to sacrifice accuracy and quality for speed. And the effect was only seen in morning tests, indicating the subjects may have either become lightly dependent on caffeine, or were more disposed to such tasks at that time of day.
So when it comes to caffeine’s effects on your work, think speed, not power. Or consider it an unresolved question. If we’re only part of the way to understanding how caffeine affects the brain, we’re a long way to knowing exactly what kind of chemicals or processes are affected when, say, one writes a post about caffeine science one highly caffeinated afternoon.
For a more direct look at what happens to your brain when there’s caffeine in your system, we turn to the the crew at Current. They hooked up one of their reporters to a brain monitor while taking on some new caffeine habits, and share their brains on caffeine:
Effectiveness, Tolerance, and Headaches
Why do so many patients coming out of anesthesia after major surgery feel a headache? It’s because, in most cases, they’re not used to going so long without coffee. The good news? If they wait a few more days, they can start saving coffee again for when they really need it.
The effectiveness of caffeine varies significantly from person to person, due to genetics and other factors in play. The average half-life of caffeine—that is, how long it takes for half of an ingested dose to wear off—is about five to six hours in a human body. Women taking oral birth control require about twice as long to process caffeine. Women between the ovulation and beginning of menstruation see a similar, if less severe, extended half-life. For regular smokers, caffeine takes half as long to process—which, in some ways, explains why smokers often drink more coffee and feel more agitated and anxious, because they’re unaware of how their bodies work without cigarettes.
As one starts to regularly take in caffeine, the body and mind build up a tolerance to it, so getting the same kind of boost as one’s first-ever sip takes more caffeine—this, researcher can agree on. Exactly how that tolerance develops is not so clear. Many studies have suggested that, just as with any drug addiction, the brain strives to return to its normal function while under “attack” from caffeine by up-regulating, or creating more adenosine receptors. But regular caffeine use has also been shown to decrease receptors for norepinephrine, a hormone akin to adrenaline, along with serotonin, a mood enhancer. At the same time, your body can see a 65 percent increase in receptors for GABA, a compound that does many things, including regulate muscle tone and neuron firing. Some studies have also seen changes in different adenosine receptors when caffeine becomes a regular thing.
Caffeine, it’s been suggested, is probably not directly responsible for all these changes. By keeping your brain from using its normal “I’m tired” sensors, though, your caffeine may be causing the brain to change the way all of its generally excitable things are regulated. Your next venti double shot goes a little less far each time, in any case. Photo by zoghal.
A 1995 study suggests that humans become tolerant to their daily dose of caffeine—whether a single soda or a serious espresso habit—somewhere between a week and 12 days. And that tolerance is pretty strong. One test of regular caffeine pill use had some participants getting an astronomical 900 milligrams per day, others placebos—found that the two groups were nearly identical in mood, energy, and alertness after 18 days. The folks taking the equivalent of nine stiff coffee pours every day weren’t really feeling it anymore. They would feel it, though, when they stopped.
You start to feel caffeine withdrawal very quickly, anywhere from 12 to 24 hours after your last use. That’s a big part of why that first cup or can in the morning is so important—it’s staving off the early effects of withdrawal. The reasons for the withdrawal are the same as with any substance dependency: your brain was used to operating one way with caffeine, and now it’s suddenly working under completely different circumstances, but all those receptor changes are still in place. Headaches are the nearly universal effect of cutting off caffeine, but depression, fatigue, lethargy, irritability, nausea, and vomiting can be part of your cut-off, too, along with more specific issues, like eye muscle spasms. Generally, though, you’ll be over it in around 10 days—again, depending on your own physiology and other factors.
Update: Commenter microinjectionist offers his own summary of more recent caffeine studies, which offers expanded reasons why caffeine users feel a “morning crash,” as well as why your whole body, not just your brain, might feel so bad when you withdraw.
Getting Out of the Habit and Learning to Tame Caffeine
Beyond the equivalent of four cups of coffee in your system at once, caffeine isn’t giving you much more boost—in fact, at around the ten-cup level, you’re probably less alert than non-drinkers. So what if you want to start getting a real boost from caffeine once again, in a newly-learned, less-dependent way?
Our own Jason Fitzpatrick has both intentionally “quit” caffeine, as well as just plain run out of coffee. Being the kind of guy who measures his own headaches and discomfort, he suggests measuring your caffeine intake, using caffeine amounts in all your drinks, chocolate, and other “boosting” foods. Wise Bread has a good roundup of caffeine amounts, and the Buzz Vs. The Bulge chart also shows how many calories you’ll be cutting if you start scaling back. Once you know your levels, map out a multi-week process of scaling down, and stick to it. Jason also suggests that dependency kicking is a good time to start taking walks, doing breathing exercises, or other mind-clearing things, because, in his experience, their effects are much greater when caffeine is not so much a part of your make-up.
Braun, author of Buzz, sees it the same way, but still uses coffee—strategically, according to our email exchange:
In practical terms, this means that if you’d like to be able to turn to caffeine when you need it for a quick, effective jolt, it’s best to let your brain “dry out” for at least several days prior to administration. This is actually my current mode of consumption. I don’t regularly drink coffee anymore (gasp).
This from a man who loved (and wore out) his home espresso maker. I love coffee in all its guises. But after 30+ years it wasn’t working for me. For one thing, the problem with caffeine is that there are adenosine receptors all over the body, including muscles. For me, that meant that caffeine made me vaguely stiff and sore, and it aggravated a tender lower back that was prone to spasm. But I also just wasn’t getting a clean, clear buzz from coffee…I drank so much, so regularly, that drinking an extra cup or two didn’t do a helluva lot except, perhaps, make me a little more irritable.
So about a year ago I slowly tapered down, and now I have, if anything, a cup of tea (half black, half peppermint) in the morning. (The amount of caffeine from the black tea isn’t enough to wire a gnat.) Not only does my body feel better now, my brain is clean of caffeine, so I really want (or need) a good neural jump-start, I will freely…nay, ecstatically…indulge. Then I stop and let the brain settle again.
That’s the theory, anyway…and it’s basically true, although I’ll freely admit that sometimes I have an espresso or coffee just because it tastes so damned good.
If you’d like Braun’s extended takes on caffeine tolerance and withdrawal, along with the advent of energy drinks and caffeine’s impact on creativity, you can read our full email interview.
That’s our attempt at summing up the science and common understanding of caffeine in one post. There is, as you can imagine, a lot more to explore—Braun’s Buzz is a good starting point, but you’ll find your own way from there. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned about caffeine, either from reading or personal experience? Share the science in the comments.
AppleJack 1.6 for Snow Leopard
By (author unknown), MacOSXHints.com – July 13, 2010 at 10:30AM
AppleJack has been updated to work with Snow Leopard with the release of version 1.6.
In a nutshell, AppleJack is a command-line utility and series of scripts for running repair tasks in Single User Mode when a bootable startup disc in not available. It’s great for those times when all you get is a blue screen and no GUI startup, and need to troubleshoot and repair the problem, but left your complete CLI reference book in your other suit.
To use it, bring up Single User Mode by holding down Command-S at startup and then when the prompt is available type applejack. Use the menu provided or select ‘auto pilot’ to perform all of the basic tasks, such as filesystem and permission repair, cache clearing, and more. There is an ‘Expert mode’ available by typing ‘x’ at the AppleJack prompt to do more operations on the hardware and user accounts. Documentation is provided in a Man page; type man applejac ...
‘Liquid armor’ based on shear-thickening non-Newtonian fluids
By Sean Michael Ragan, MAKE – July 12, 2010 at 01:00PM
Speaking broadly, non-Newtonian fluids are of two types: Either they get thinner under shear, or they get thicker. Shear-thickening fluids, like the common corn flour-water mixture sometimes called “oobleck,” obviously, get thicker when a force is applied. This new and highly secretive non-Newtonian fluid formulation by British defense giant BAE is like oobleck to the power of ten, and can, reportedly, be very effectively combined with Kevlar to improve human body armor performance against bullets. [via Fast Company]
Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » |
The Holy Grail of Ubiquitous Plain-Text Capture [Plain Text]
By Adam Pash, Lifehacker – July 12, 2010 at 12:00PM
Despite all the cool productivity porn modern technology has birthed, the Holy Grail for me is simple: I want to create and edit plain text from anywhere (desktop/tablet/phone), and I want the results to sync flawlessly between devices. And now I can.
Ubiquitous capture—that is, the ability to snag any thought or idea any time and any where it happens to crop up—is a key component to nearly every productivity philosophy. You want to capture those fleeting ideas before they’re gone, and you don’t want to waste brain power obsessing over remembering it until you can write it down somewhere. Below, I’ll walk you through the best ubiquitous capture system I’ve ever encountered.
First, a note: What works best for me may not be what works best for you. A lot of people prefer applications like Evernote, which lets you capture nearly any form of text or media you want and is accessible via the web, desktop applications, and smartphone apps. Personally, Evernote’s a bit too large (and sometimes too bloated) for my taste. All I’ve ever wanted is the ability to create plain text files on my computer, sync those files to my phone and other computers (without any extra effort on my part), and the ability to edit or create new files from any of those buckets. That’s what I describe below.
The Glue: Simplenote
We’ve mentioned Simplenote once before on Lifehacker, but just to recap: Simplenote is a killer web application that does one very simple thing very, very well. That one thing? Creating, editing, and managing as many plain text notes as your heart could ever desire. Apart from managing my to-do list, my ideas list, my shopping list, and virtually every other list I could ever need, I now write nearly everything in Simplenote (including the post you’re reading right now). Simplenote has a really good, open API, so you can also find desktop applications and smartphone apps that work with Simplenote—which I’ll get to in a bit. First, here’s a look at Simplenote’s web interface:
(Click any of the images for a closer look.)
Simplenote may seem a touch peculiar at first, so here’s a rundown of how it works:
- This is the search box. When you want to find a note—either by title or by text inside that note—just head to the search box. Every application that plugs into the Simplenote API generally works similarly.
- These are your notes. Enter a search, and Simplenote filters out and narrows down the matches. Click on a note or navigate through the list with the up/down arrows to open it.
- This is the main content area. It displays your current note. Pretty obvious, right?
- Click this + (plus) button to create a new note. The first line of your new note will become your note’s title.
This is all pretty simple so far, right? And well it should be. The whole point here is that it’s a lightweight, no-nonsense tool for managing your lists and notes. The web version of Simplenote highlighted above is nice because it’s accessible to any browser (just log in to get to your notes), but that’s still not perfect. What we really want is to be able to access our notes offline from our phone or desktop and sync back to Simplenote when necessary. So let’s figure that out.
Simplenote on Your Desktop
Simplenote comes in a variety of flavors for desktop users, but the two best apps I’ve found are ResophNotes (for Windows), pictured above, and Notational Velocity (for OS X), pictured below. Both closely mimic the functionality of the webapp, so my explanation of the webapp above applies to these desktop applications, as well. With both apps, just open the preferences and enter in your Simplenote credentials to get them up and syncing. (If you haven’t already registered for a Simplenote account, you can do so here.)
The nice thing about the desktop applications is that you can create and edit new notes even when you’re offline, and they’ll take care of syncing the results back to Simplenote when you’re back online. Both Notational Velocity and ResophNotes are very keyboard-friendly, too, which goes a long way toward winning over the keyboard shortcut lovers at Lifehacker.
Notational Velocity is probably the nicer of the two if we’re comparing, namely because the app can store files in plain text in any folder—meaning I can easily back up my notes to my Dropbox folder (I’m in plain text geek heaven). ResophNotes has its charm, too, including a few features—like a one-click force sync—that we’d like to see in Notational Velocity. Either way, both apps are excellent in the same way Simplenote is. They’re barebones, distraction-free, plain text editors that help you focus on text and text only. If you’re going to use Simplenote, I highly recommend you use a desktop application like one of these for offline access and backup. You can check out all of the various Simplenote desktop apps and browser extensions here.
Note: Now is probably also a good time to mention that a couple of us at Lifehacker are currently working on a cross-platform, open-source Adobe AIR app for Simplenote called Textify with hopes of bringing the best features we can come up with to every platform. We’re still in the very early stages of development, but you can find the latest source here on GitHub. We’re happy to accept help!
Of course, the Holy Grail of plain text syncing and editing isn’t really complete until you can do it all from your phone.
Simplenote on the iPhone and iPad
This is where iOS users really win out. Simplenote is available (from the folks who built the webapp) as an iPhone and iPad application. It’s fast, snappy, and, frankly, better than their web version. Each time you open it, it syncs with all your latest notes if you’ve got a connection; if you don’t have a wireless connection, you can still edit your notes and let Simplenote sync your changes back to Simplenote on the web next time you do. You can see Simplenote running on the iPhone in the screenshot to the left and running on the iPad in the screenshot below.
Coupled with a bluetooth keyboard, the iPad version of Simplenote is a real gem. I now do the majority of my long-form writing on my iPad, which is propped onto a $1 business card iPad stand. With everything set up, I feel like I’m writing on a distraction-free typewriter—one that just happens to be connected to the internet and that syncs flawlessly to my desktop, the web, and my phone. Simplenote for iOS also supports TextExpander touch for quick text replacement snippets.
But what about Android/my other non-iPhone? Good question. Since Simplenote is web-accessible, you certainly can fire up the web interface and add some notes from there, but the web interface is not really mobile-friendly. Some people have been working on an open-source version of Simplenote for Android, but it’s still not quite there yet. We’ll keep our eyes on it, though, and let you know if it ever makes it to primetime. Likewise, we haven’t seen any apps for other devices that plug into Simplenote’s API, but hopefully a little exposure will inspire some like-minded developers.
Simplenote certainly isn’t the only solution that can accomplish the same (or at least similar) results, but it is the best solution I’ve found to fit my needs. If you’ve got a different method you prefer, tell us all about it in the comments.
Adam Pash is the editor of Lifehacker and a lover of plain text. You can find his various productivity musings every day here at Lifehacker and with more off-message frequency @adampash on Twitter.
Comic for July 11, 2010
Blazing UFO Causes Chinese Airport Closure [Ufo]
By Brian Barrett, Gizmodo – July 09, 2010 at 08:20PM
I’m not saying there were aliens flying whatever buzzed Hangzhou airspace earlier today. But there’s no question that it was an object, that it was flying, and that it’s as yet unidentified. And yet it looks awfully familiar up close: More »
UFO – Paranormal – Organizations – United States – Directories
Summary of 35 USC 101 caselaw, software and business method patents
By nipper, The Invent Blog – July 09, 2010 at 04:21PM
This really is the best summary of 35 U.S.C. §101 caselaw as it relates to software and/or business method patents:
@erikjheels on: A Mere Mortal’s Guide To Patents Post-Bilski (Or Why §101 Is A Red Herring)
Bookmark it.
Related posts:
- Software patents in Europe Arnoud Engelfriet e-mailed me to some links on his site…
- In re Bilski Roundup I doubt any readers of this blog don’t know that…