Ever wondered what goes on up at the International Space Station? We like to think it’s all floating around and eating freeze-dried steak. Astronaut Don Pettit decided to take a break from his no-doubt mundane routine and capture the spectacular image you see above. We say image, it’s actually multiple 30-second exposure snaps layered on top of each other. Needless to say the result is both humbling, and hypnotic. Best of all? There’s a collection of them, waiting to steal your afternoon with slack-jawed wonderment. Hit the source for the mind-melt.
Only a small percentage of innovators are also inventors. If necessity is the mother of invention, obsession is the father of innovation. Innovators iterate and combine preexisting ideas until they incrementally modify an invention such that it embodies a marketable value proposition upon which a sustainable company can be created.
If you are solely an inventor, your startup options include: (i) sell the intellectual property underlying your inventions before they are commercialized, which will net you nominal value, (ii) partner with someone who has innovator skills, or (iii) risk losing it all by attempting to play the roles of both inventor and innovator. Few people are successful at both roles because each requires the distinct skills, aptitudes and proclivities noted above.
Everyone’s favorite roadside explosives purveyor, Phantom Fireworks, is now offering “firework previews” on a fleet of Nook Tablets that will be available in stores. The tablets will will allow customers to view photos and videos of the fireworks they’re buying and will streamline retail operations, allowing customer service reps to place orders at the customer’s side.
The Youngstown, Ohio-based company is one of the first to use cheap, entry-level tablets on the show floor. Fans of snailnet will appreciate the method of video distribution: “All the demo videos are stored and uploaded onto a secure digital (SD) card at the Phantom Fireworks corporate office in Youngstown and shipped out to the different showrooms across the country.” This presumably reduces the need for the local sites to have a fast Internet connection.
“The tablets provide a fantastic tool for our customers to demo fireworks before they buy them,” Kendall said. “It’s always about improving their customer experience in the showrooms. With the Nooks, we have the ability to turn customers onto Phantom products they’ve never experienced or purchased, which is a great thing.”
This also points towards an interesting trend. Obviously Phantom Fireworks locations don’t need to look as fancified so the Nook Tablet – or a Kindle Fire, for that matter, although the sneakernet SD card swap system wouldn’t work, – is a perfect device. It’s solid, has an acceptable screen, and the floor staff look automatically cooler for using it. Coupled with their excellent Fireworks.com URL it looks like these Phantom folks are pretty darn plugged in for the second place that you visit before you go drink in your cousin’s back yard.
Our first special edition #mHealth chat, about FDA regulations and mobile medical apps, was a success thanks to our guest M. Jason Brooke, J.D., FDA regulatory attorney from Washington DC, and many other great participants.
Cooking pasta isn’t rocket science, but cooking pasta well is definitely an acquired skill—one that takes a little guidance. We’ve shown you the right way to cook pasta and how to match your pasta with the right sauce: now let’s set you straight on how to properly sauce your pasta once it’s cooked.
In all fairness, “right” is such a subjective term that it’s impossible to apply universally, but the method in the Chow video at the top of this post is guaranteed to get you a hot, evenly sauced, and totally delicious plate of pasta for dinner every time you do it. No more “red water” at the bottom of your plate of pasta, no more cold and sticky pasta with searingly hot sauce on top, and no more pasta drowning in a bowl of soupy sauce.
The trick is to move the pasta right out of the hot water into the pot with the sauce, instead of draining away all of the water and letting the pasta sit around while you work on the sauce. Add the hot, starchy pasta right to the sauce and cook it for about a minute so everything’s hot and well combined. Then the magic touch: a little pasta water to make that sauce stick to the pasta nicely. After that, turn off the heat and add your oil, butter, cheese, and/or herbs before serving (and adding more cheese, if you like!)
Chef Andrew Carmellini is a little less forgiving than I would be towards other pasta saucing methods (for example, I love the cold water/frying pan method), but he definitely has some good tips. Check out the video above or at the link below and let us know what some of your favorite pasta prep methods are in the comments.
Killing animals ain’t pretty but if we eat them, we should face the reality of how it happens. Michael Ruhlman did just that, he went inside Schmidt Family Farms and was shown how the chickens you eat are killed, bled, de-feathered and processed before they hit the market. More »
Not only this image wins the internet for the most amazing image of the Venus transit, but to me it’s also one of the most impressive images in the history of astronomy and space exploration. The scale and the feeling left me in awe. More »
Dr. Charles A. Leale, a young army surgeon on leave for the evening, was the first physician to reach President Lincoln’s side at Ford’s Theater and the first to prognosticate the President’s demise, “His wound is mortal. It is impossible for him to recover.” More »
Contestants frequently make the same mistake which annoys me every time. The sharks commonly ask the contestants whether they have a patent on their invention. The contestant frequently replies with, “I have a provisional patent.” To my surprise, the sharks (who are generally very business savvy) typically accept this answer and move on. However, if I were a shark on the show I would immediately respond with “I’m out.” All inventors should know that there is no such thing as a provisional patent.
There is such a thing as a provisional patent application. However, a provisional patent application is never examined and basically serves a “placeholder” for a forthcoming non-provisional application. Anyone can file a provisional application on anything they want and state they have a provisional application. For example, someone can go out and file a provisional application on the same light bulb that Edison invented in 1879 and claim they have a “provisional patent application” on the light bulb. But of course, any forthcoming non-provisional application would be rejected by the United States Patent and Trademark Office and hence the provisional application in this case is completely worthless.
