In this morning's National Rifle Association (NRA) press conference, Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre found a lot of things to blame for the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy, much rehashed from the NRA's past responses to mass shootings. Video games, the absence of armed policemen in schools, and pure evil made the list, as did Hurricane Sandy.
Here's what LaPierre didn't blame:
THE .223 BUSHMASTER SEMI-AUTOMATIC ASSAULT RIFLE
The weapon used by Adam Lanza when he massacred 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, according to the medical examiner (December, 2012).
THE AR-15 ASSAULT RIFLE
One of the weapons used by James Holmes at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado that killed and injured a total of 70 people (July, 2012).
.40-CALIBER GLOCK
The weapon used by Jeffrey Weise, who murdered 9 people and wounded 5 others on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota (March, 2005).
GLOCK 19 SEMI-AUTOMATIC PISTOL
One of the weapons used by Seung-Hui Cho, who injured and killed 56 people at the Virginia Tech Campus (April, 2007).
AK-47
The weapon used by former Caltrans employee Arturo Reyes Torres who opened fire at a maintenance yard, killed 5 and injuring 2.
INTRATEC TEC-9 PISTOL
Friday, December 21, 2012
6 Things the NRA Didn't Blame For Mass Shootings
Watch The World Not End All Day With This Live Stream From The International Space Station
If the world breaks open or shudders to a halt today, the folks on the International Space Station will be the first to know about it. Or, you know, the second. The first to know about it will be the folks who are suddenly swallowed whole by a raging Earth or thrown from the planet’s surface into the frigid, uncaring void of space, but they’re probably not going to be much for reporting back on what’s happening, what with all the screaming and crying and begging for mercy. Sissies. Anyway, if you find yourself needing reassurance that the world is not in fact ending, look no further than the ISS’s eye in the sky live stream, embedded below for your convenience. The feed will give you an astronaut’s eye view of all life on Earth… moving on uninterrupted in pretty much the way it does every day. Hey, don’t look at us — we said it was reassuring, not exciting.
Broadcasting live with Ustream
The live stream from the ISS isn’t perfect — depending on what’s happening on the ISS itself, where the station is in its orbit, and what kind of contact it has with the planet’s surface, the ISS Earth cam may stop showing the Earth and begin showing the inside of the station. The feed may even just go dark. If this happens, don’t worry — it is not a sign of the end times. Probably.
Don’t worry if your view from the feed camera is limited, though — if a serpent made of flame or a legion of demons emerges from the world’s dark places to shatter our peaceful existence, the folks at the ISS will no doubt mention it at some point. Those tend to be the sorts of things that dominate conversation around the water cooler.
(via International Space Station, image courtesy of NASA)
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For all of those still worried, NASA's got you covered...
Thursday, December 20, 2012
There’s a New Form of Magnetism, New State of Matter Thanks to MIT
We all learned in elementary school that the three states of matter are solid, liquid, and gas. Then if you took science classes in high school you probably learned plasma was a state of matter too. For most people, it stops there, but there are actually a lot more states matter can get itself into, and science just went and found a new one. MIT researchers have discovered a new state of matter, complete with its own unique form of magnetism. We can’t wait to see what the Insane Clown Posse has to say about this.
The new state of matter is known as a quantum spin liquid (QSL) and it’s been believed to be possible since 1987, but hasn’t been proven until now. The researchers at MIT spent months growing a small sample of a crystal known as herbertsmithite, a mineral named after mineralogist Herbert Smith, to test the hypothesis that it was a QSL. Turns out, it is. They published their findings in a paper titled Fractionalized Excitations in the Spin-Liquid State of a Kagome-Lattice Antiferromagnet. If you’re in a band, and that isn’t the name of your next album then you’re doing it wrong.
When most people think of magnets, what they’re thinking of are examples of ferromagnetism. All the electrons in ferromagnets have the same charge and are aligned in the same direction. It’s what causes the north/south poles of magnets. Antiferromagnets have electrons that face opposite directions, and basically cancel out the magnetic charge of the object. Herbestsmithite, or ZnCu3(OD)6Cl2 if you want to get technical about it, is a kagome-lattice antiferromagnet.
The new type of magnetism found in QSLs like herbertsmithite is unique because the electrons fluctuate direction. The strong interaction between the electrons prevents them from being locked into place. So, while the state of the crystal is solid, the state of its magnetic field is in flux.
Besides giving you a new state of matter to throw around the next time someone tells you there are only four, QSLs could potentially lead to new forms of magnetic data storage, communications, and superconductors that can operate at higher temperatures.
(via ExtremeTech, image via sparr0)
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Creators of Zork to accept Pioneer Award at DICE Summit, hide WIRED interview behind new text adventure
If you've ever been eaten by a grue, you can blame Dave Lebing, Marc Blank and and a small team of their friends -- Zork, and the notoriously frustrating text adventure game genre that followed is all their fault. The games were challenging, but they were also the most complex narratives told through video games at the time, and their creators are finally getting their dues. Early next year, Blank and Lebing are slated to receive the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Pioneer Award at the DICE Summit. The name implies the details: the award honors those who helped pioneer the gaming industry with their early work, ultimately paving the way for the titles and hardware we enjoy today. How influential was the title? Too young for nostalgic reminisces of "interactive fiction?" Head on over to Wired for a lesson in history -- it's hidden its entire interview with Dave Lebling behind a text adventure of its own design.
Oh the endless hours I spent in the great underground empire Well deserved award. Congrats to all
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
It's official: Florida passes the millionth concealed weapons permit milestone
« Florida Republicans still mum on a response to Newtown shooting | Main | Atwater wants Scott to appoint inspector general at Citizens immediately »
It's official: Florida passes the millionth concealed weapons permit milestone
TALLAHASSEE -- Florida officials don't know when, but sometime in the last 24 hours someone received the 1 millionth concealed weapons permit in Florida -- making it the first state to reach that mileston.
"We have 1,000,645 concealed licenses as of this morning," said Amanda Bevis, a spokeswoman for Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, who oversees the permit program. "Yesterday, we had 999,932, so we crossed the milestone at some point yesterday."
Putnam held a news conference last week -- two days before the Newtown, Conn. shooting -- that touted the milestone. While Putnam at the news conferernce said he wasn't celebrating the 1 million mark, the press release was titled: Firearm License Program is One Million Strong.
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Ohh I feel much safer now...
Report: Data Caps Help Carriers Rake In Huge Profits
In case you weren’t quite certain why wireline and wireless carriers were capping your data, it’s not about bandwidth. Instead, they are able to charge a premium for faster speeds and more data, thereby raking in profits over and above what they’ve gotten in the past. In short, write Hibah Hussain, Danielle Kehl, Benjamin Lennett, and Patrick Lucey of the New America Foundation:
Internet service and mobile providers appear to be one of the few industries that seek to discourage their customers from consuming more of their product. The reason for this counterintuitive business model is that in the noncompetitive US marketplace, it is highly profitable.”The paper itself goes into the history of bandwidth caps and isn’t saying much we didn’t already know. Basically the false scarcity imposed by service providers helps them maintain high profits while blaming data hogs. As data usage went up, however, the cost of providing that data went down.
This combination of caps and higher prices also applies to services like text messaging. Even though “the cost a carrier incurs by transmitting an SMS message has not increased in recent years,”carriers have continued raising prices and imposing limits.[8]As with data caps, the prices charged to consumers do not correspond with the costs for carriers.ISPs often claim that caps are necessary to curb “excessive use” and only affect a small fraction of users. Although some providers are reexamining their data caps policies, many of the limits imposed several years ago have largely remained static, even as typical household bandwidth consumption has substantially increased. In 2008, Comcast reported that its median residential broadband user consumed 2.5 GB of data monthly.[9]In 2012, Comcast reports that this number has quadrupled to a median monthly usage of 8-10 GB per consumer.[10]Other sources report even higher usage numbers. According to the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Measuring Broadband America report, the median cable broadband user in the United States consumed about 28 GB a month in mid-2012.[11]As new Internet applications and devices continue to be created, yesterdays so called “bandwidth hogs” are today’s typical users.
We all know the carriers will come back with the old “But infrastructure costs money!” argument but considering the slow roll-out of FiOS and related high-speed data services, they’re clearly sitting on their cash hoard until enough of us complain. As the authors note, “Data caps encourage a climate of scarcity in an increasingly data-driven world.” And scarcity makes money.
HELLO #ATT ?